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18 November 2019
13:15
Ruppert 033

Seminar: Marta Miklokowska – Immigrant attitudes among adolescents

Adolescents’ Negative Attitudes Toward Immigrants: Risk and Protective Factors.

 

Adolescents grow up in an ethnically diverse world fueled by increases in immigration.

At the same time, immigrant children are sometimes the targets of negative attitudes that fuel prejudice-based harassment at school. Thus, schools seek to foster more positive attitudes among youth.

 

Adolescents’ attitudes have also larger societal importance. Unlike the attitudes of adults, youth attitudes are still malleable and have been shown to largely persist later in life. This implies that one of the most effective ways to reduce societal prejudice might be to work with youth.

 

In this talk, I will present my longitudinal research on the development of Swedish majority youth attitudes towards immigrants. In particular, I will discuss the role of social contexts (parents, peers, schools) and adolescents’ empathy. I will also discuss the relevance of my findings for programs aimed at fostering positive relations among ethnically diverse youth.

 

Speaker:

Dr. Marta Miklikowska is an Assistant Professor at Umeå University in Sweden. She is a social-developmental psychologist with a research focus on youth ethnic relations. She seeks to identify factors that contribute to or help to reduce anti-immigrant attitudes in adolescence. To that end, she looks at the role of cross-ethnic friendships, empathy, and social contexts (parents, peers, school).