 Hi, I'm Alita. Thank you for inviting me and thank you Christina for the introduction This is going to be slightly different from the last two speakers. Although Thomas did mention issues of integration and Director indirect discrimination and how these different groups can live in a symbiotic way So I'm going to talk about two things One is my research with my co-author listener plat on the type of contact and its relationship with ethnic identity and its implication for the current situation and Then also very briefly talk a little bit about a large UK household panel study that I am using in this research, which is quite useful for ethnicity and migration research So this is the research that I'm going to talk about now the way it relates to today's session and The conference is that we have seen recent increase in the number of migrants Which means there will going to be a lot of different people from different groups We're going to be brought in very close contact with each other very quickly and there will be issues of how these groups will deal with each other and There is always potential of intergroup conflict Now, what do we know about these issues until now? Now, this is nothing new It may be new in some countries, but multicultural and diverse societies have been dealing with this issue for a long time There are many countries which have a very long history of migration of different groups living together The US, some of the South American countries like Brazil, India, many African countries have Faced this issue But I will specifically talk about the UK today now in the UK most of the Public political and academic debate and research has actually focused on the immigration since the 1950s Which brought with it new ethnic groups, which UK was not familiar with at that time But in fact prior to the 1950s There is a long history of regional differences in the UK where there are strong regional identities and intergroup conflict So if you're not familiar with this issue, this is the map of UK UK is actually comprised of four separate countries and the England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland You can see the population distribution and Our current research has shown that there are even now, so it's not something that happened 50 years ago even now there are very strong regional identities, so country identities, Scottish, English, Welsh, Northern Irish identities and Quite often it is weaker than What is now considered to be a national identity, the Britishness or British identity So I just wanted to Put this in perspective Now going back to what is Typically referred to as ethnic groups or ethnic minority groups in the UK These these as I said are the groups that arrived since the 1950s mostly from Commonwealth countries So the five major ethnic minority groups that are often talked about are Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Black, Caribbean and African groups and then recently since 2001 white minority groups Now in the 1960s and 70s There was a lot of focus on discrimination and disadvantage that these ethnic minorities group faced in housing, in employment and various other sectors and Soon after that the race relations acts Was implemented and then it has been upgrade I mean revised since then quite a few times But what that meant is You would need to to understand whether this discrimination and disadvantage was being Addressed these issues you would have to somehow monitor and that is why the Question rose that how would we monitor them and so in 1991 for the first time the UK sensors introduced questions on ethnic groups Now this is slightly different from the way the Language is in The last two speakers it is not an issue of immigrants and natives because By now a lot of immigrants have children who have grown up their second generation So they don't consider themselves immigrants for obvious reasons. So the language is more in terms of ethnic groups So this is just a quick look at the 2011 UK census and As you can see this is a sorry 2011 UK census ethnic group question and These are the categories now the first category which says white English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and British that is Most people would take that and that is the what is we refer to as either white British or white majority group So they are the majority group there And now This is how the proportion of ethnic minorities in the UK has increased over the last three censuses So in 1991 about 7% were non-white ethnic minorities You couldn't identify White minorities in 2001 the proportion rose to 9% and if you include White ethnic minorities it's 12% and now the total number of ethnic minorities is about 18 to 19% So it's about one-fifth of UK's population Now just the way there is a long history of diverse ethnic groups living together and conflict There is a long history in Disciplines like sociology anthropology social psychology of trying to understand these so why are certain groups formed and some groups continue While others disappear. Why is there discrimination and prejudice against out-group members and in favor of in-group members? What it is that driving these attitudes then there are quite often very strong prescriptions on individual behavior by the groups So you belong to a group and there are certain ways you behave certain things you don't do you don't interact with other group members and so on So these have been studied for over 50 60 years actually longer in some disciplines Now the one that I'm going to focus on which is the focus of the research is and only touch fell as a was a social psychologist and He postulated that to understand discrimination and prejudice What you need to find out is two things one are people able to identify groups And second do they identify themselves with these groups? So both things are needed not just the existence of different groups But whether you identify with these groups and that is called social identity then of course the question is what are groups and These are three academics from different disciplines and they've all come to the same conclusion there is no Objective basis for groups in most cases so you can't say this is what it is in a multicultural multi-ethnic society All the group members know who belongs to which group the lines are known and everybody's aware of it But if you were to come from a different society and try to find out it would take you a while to figure out Why is it that these groups exist? Sometimes it's language sometimes regional differences sometimes Religion but there is no objective basis for it and sometimes it's difficult for outsiders to even understand Why are these groups so different or they consider themselves to be different? So we will take groups as given So what touch fell said is social identity will be understood as that part of an individual self-concept Which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group or groups together with the value and emotional Significance attached to that membership And this is quite key The There was a series of experiments that were done by touch fell and his predecessors and some of his Newer colleagues these are now referred to as the minimal experiments. They are really interesting experiments What they did was they basically asked people that you can give money to someone It's a hypothetical question and this person belongs to your group and then another hypothetical question This person belongs to a different group Now as you would expect people tended to give more money to their in-group members less to our group members Now that is fine. That was expected But then what they did is they tinkered with the definition of groups instead of pre-existing groups They then assigned people to groups based on say their favorite painter Picasso and clandzinski or something like that was one of the experiments It's still persisted Then what they did was they they even took away any kind of link to you and your group So they literally flipped a coin in front of the respondents and said you're going to be assigned to this group and you to that group So there was no basis for these groups, but just the fact that they belong to these groups They still Exhibited the same kind of behavior. It was weaker because these groups made less sense, but still it existed. So the idea is This identification with group is very important You extend your own identity and you attach it to the group and then this behavior becomes sort of almost obvious and This is her But we do need to distinguish between the social identity with personal identity people are different and people do differentiate between themselves and Everybody else and so when you think of personal identity you talk in terms of I versus them In terms of social identity you talk us versus them. So immediately you can see the difference In social identity you don't care about individual differences or characteristics. So the individuals matter less Suddenly they become representatives of groups and you only see groups in personal identity. There are many differences and you just Discuss the individual characteristics So what Ashfa and others then Conceptualized was this what is called a continuum of identity or even intergroup differences Where at the one extent end our social context where your intergroup differences are highlighted So this is when media is constantly talking about These this group and that group and they did this and that many immigrants have arrived and doing this So there you are constantly badgered with this information that these are other group members and that's where your social identity gets heightened and the other extreme are Situations where your intra group differences or interpersonal differences are highlighted So suppose as of two previous speakers have already mentioned in Interethnic marriages. So your partner is of a different ethnic group in those situations You are less likely to think of them as a group member and more as your partner. So it's the individual differences that matter and We and these situations are fluid. So you can move in and out of these situations and your identities vary accordingly now Contact theory also came to a very similar conclusion I'll put a 1954 said that if you are in Situations where there is equal group status Within that situation. There are common goals intergroup cooperation and authority support that will lead to reduction of prejudice and there is some empirical basis for that so the Hypothesis or the framework is this that if you have contact with other ethnic group members that reduces the intergroup differences then it reads to Reduction of prejudice and what social scientists did is that they said there is a link in between the way it this prejudice decreases is by weakening of your social identity and That is what we are going to Measure today There is very little empirical research using large-scale data. There are experimental evidence and small-scale surveys which have found similar findings and so what we will do is we're going to use a very large UK national survey and Try to see whether these hypothesis hold so we are going to consider two types of contact one Which is we call just type one contact which reduces intergroup differences and then see if it reduces social identity and The other is type two contact and Then we will see whether these relationships differ for ethnic minorities and majority groups in the UK Sorry So the data that we're going to use is from understanding societies a household panel survey that started in 2009 with around 30,000 households and What we then did was we matched information for every individual adult respondents in our survey with the region that they were living in the locality and We matched the data to the census data of that locality to get the ethnic group composition We are just considering 16 to 59 year olds living in England mostly because most ethnic minorities live in England So the comparison and that is our sample sizes And if you're interested then these are the sample sizes for the different ethnic minority groups That is there in our sample and we're going to study that Just to be clear in all these models that we are going to estimate We are controlling for all the usual factors by which the ethnic groups very age sex, mental status, education, husband, income, occupation, class, health and neighborhood deprivation So what is the first? Hypothesis the first hypothesis is minority ethnic group members will express stronger ethnic identity than the majority group Because all their contact and context heightens into group differences So they're always they are aware that they are the ethnic minority. They're always made aware of it And so it is going to be stronger than with the majority On the other hand first generation those who have arrived recently for them it shouldn't matter less because they are still not aware of these groups and So for them the ethnic identity should be weaker. So what did we find? We did find ethnic minorities report stronger ethnic identity than white majority respondents. This is robust across different specifications But surprisingly there was no generational difference across first and second generation Ethnic identity was very strong much stronger than white majority the next hypothesis is We would expect both minority and majority members who are living in mixed ethnic relationships will express weaker ethnic identity than others and Similarly, if they have very close and best friends who are of a different ethnic group again They're likely to have weaker social identity Because this is a cross-sectional analysis right now You could say that it's it is a matter of reverse causality You have a weaker ethnic identity Hence you make friends or partner with people of a different ethnic group So what we will do is we will split the duration of these relationships If it is not a case of reverse causality, then we should only see these relationships hold for long duration partnerships So what do we find we find for? Everyone if they are living in mixed ethnic partnerships They are more likely to report weaker ethnic identity and this holds only for durations that are five years or longer Because that means it has changed over the years and it's not selection For the next hypothesis about best friends ethnic group for ethnic minorities We see it does hold up and it holds up for relationships that are three years or longer But not ten years. I'm guessing it could be something to do with small small sample sizes at that end But for interestingly for white majority respondents, we don't find the support for this What we do find is if they have friends of a different these are best friends So they're very close friends of a different ethnic group. They report a stronger ethnic identity This was quite surprising But what we realize is once we control for ethnic group composition in your neighborhood This statistical significance disappeared So it's quite possible that what majority are more likely to have close friends if they are living in the areas Where there are people of different ethnic group and so this variable was proxying for the neighborhood effect Which I'll talk about just now so then if you look at type 2 a contact where we've measured in two ways one is the proportion of own ethnic group in your neighborhood and The other is the proportion of your casual acquaintance not people with whom you have very close contact What proportion of them are of a different ethnic group? And as I said, we would expect that because these are casual contacts people you just see but you don't really interact closely It's likely to lead to stronger ethnic identity Interestingly what we find is for ethnic minorities, they don't hold up. They don't matter But what does matter is whether you live in London or not? And that is because London has about 45 to 50 percent ethnic minorities So London is like a little different country in UK the entire national context changes And so that is why we find a different result that ethnic minorities living in London have a weaker ethnic identity Because it's a different context For the wide majority we do have Support for this hypothesis I'll skip this. So what is the conclusion? So the main conclusion is that we have evidence of weakening effect on ethnic identity due to close contact with other group members partners and close best friends and The reverse is true when it's just casual contact. You're just aware of these groups present So in terms of policy recommendations obviously cannot make strong policy recommendations But the idea is that if different ethnic groups are brought in close contact with each other in situations where they can interact on an Individual basis they will start to see each other as individuals and less as group members and that is how one goes about reducing prejudice and discrimination I'll skip this and I just want to spend two three minutes on The study that I used for this analysis So this is a UK house along your study which started in 2009. It started with around 40,000 households All adults that is 16 years or above in these sampled households and their descendants are followed and interviewed every year and so and But anybody moving into these households are also interviewed because they provide the household context This has three components one is a general population sample of 26,000 households and That is representative of the UK it has a huge geographical spread which allowed me to do this analysis where I had variation by location and The large sample size also allows different minority samples like single mothers they disabled people to be analyzed separately What is good and particularly of interest here is that it has an ethnic minority boost sample of around 4,000 households With at least thousand adult interviews from the five major ethnic minority groups and this is the only Survey in the UK which allows longitudinal research for ethnicity and migration. So if you want to study Employment dynamics poverty dynamics and so on could use that This has another component, which is a long-running similar household panel survey, which was then added to this but I'll talk about that This is The in wave one when it were started. This is what the sample sizes look like and Just if you're going to do use this for your analysis Remember that the ethnic minority boost sample and the general population sample should be used together because otherwise they Don't have otherwise you'll have coverage error because the ethnic minority boost sample was selected from high ethnic minority concentration areas and Then after five waves of survey in the sixth wave as you we added a new ethnic minority and boost sample the reason was partly that as you would expect with attrition the sample sizes for the ethnic minority groups had reduced but also we Had did not include any immigrants who had arrived into the country since 2009 and because UK is such a constantly changing Society that would have been a problem. And so we added that So in combination with it it allows you to do longitudinal research for ethnicity and migration These are some of the new sample numbers that we have don't cite it because we've not released the data as yet I'm just showing you and I'll just end With again if you're interested in doing research in UK with this that there are a lot of interesting questions They cover different measures of measuring ethnic groups not just the census ethnic group question But religion your parents grandparents Country of birth the year you arrived language that you spoke when you were a child national identity ethnic identity and so on and A whole bunch of behavior variables like remittances migration history experience of harassment reasons for migration and so on and Then because it's a multi ethnicity is one angle of the survey So it's a multipurpose survey. It has all the usual questions that you would anyway expect in such surveys I'll not go over the list again and Just to give one Quick look at the reasons for migration. This is the new data that we have just collected and going to be released in November This year, so we were just looking at reasons for migration by gender and As you can see and as you would expect at least in the case of UK Women are more likely to arrive as family migrants to join their partners and men are more likely to arrive as work or Education and other reasons so I'll just end