The utility of Allport's conditions of intergroup contact for predicting perceptions of improved racial attitudes and beliefs - Contact Hypothesis

Journal of Social Issues, Winter, 1998 by Michele Andrisin Wittig, Sheila Grant-Thompson

Discussion

Although our results are correlational and thus have limited explanatory value, they have several implications for the Contact Hypothesis (Allport, 1954/1979; Cook, 1985), whose conditions, as they relate to the present context, are as follows:

1. Support is given by authorities (e.g., teachers, facilitators, other role models), which strengthens norms and expectations that the groups will interact positively.

2. Target participants are given equal status within the situation.

3. Cooperative interdependence is fostered; that is, there is cooperation across groups in working toward common goals.

4. The contact is individualized, so participants get to know one another as persons.

5. Positive interaction is promoted that weakens negative stereotypes and strengthens positive ones.

Utility of Teacher, Facilitator, and Student Perceptions of Interracial Climate

Using a scale of five items designed to tap the above factors as implemented in the classroom, we assessed middle and high school teachers' beliefs that college student discussion leaders achieved a classroom climate that satisfies the conditions of the Contact Hypothesis. We then showed that scores on this scale were predictive of their judgment of the success of a prejudice reduction program targeting their students. This was demonstrated using three program outcomes, each assessing a different aspect of the teachers' judgments of program success: students' comfort in talking about racial issues, students' recognition of the equal worth of all groups, and students' openness to forming interracial friendships. A second series of regression analyses revealed that the facilitators' judgments of the extent to which these classroom conditions were achieved were similarly related to the same three indicators of program success. The third series of regression analyses showed that students' perceptions of the school interracial climate contributed modestly to the prediction of their postintervention levels of comfort talking about race, willingness to affirm the equal worth of all groups, and openness to interracial friendships, when preintervention levels of the outcome variables were taken into account.

Relation of Teacher and Facilitator Perceptions of Student Outcomes to Actual Student Outcomes

Neither teacher nor facilitator judgments of program success correlated with measures of actual student improvements on the above three criteria. This result may be due, in part, to the respective methods of assessing student outcomes: in week 8, teachers and facilitators made retrospective judgments of student improvement in three racial beliefs and attitudes. In contrast, students responded to items directly tapping these three racial beliefs and attitudes in both weeks 1 and 8. Furthermore, the small number of teacher and facilitator cases available for pairing with student data renders the obtained correlations unreliable. It is hoped that future research will explore this finding further.

Importance of Assessing Multiple Levels of Interracial Climate