Growing Up Diverse: Social Cohesion among Immigrant and Native Youth

Cel

Contemporary youth in Europe are growing up amidst increasing ethnic diversity, rising anti-immigrant sentiments, and pervasive online environments. These profound societal shifts raise a timely question: How is social integration—or cohesion— evolving among today’s immigrant and native youth, and what mechanisms sustain or erode it?

While much research has focused on cohesion between immigrant and native youth—using a two-group, binary model of social cohesion—, far less is known about how cohesion takes shape within and across multiple groups: (1) how cohesion among native youth may be challenged due to ideological divides on migration and diversity; (2) how cohesion unfolds among youth from diverse migration backgrounds, and (3) how gains in cohesion within one group may undermine cohesion among another group.

This project shifts the field in these new directions, advancing a groundbreaking framework for understanding multigroup social cohesion among and between immigrant and native youth. The focus is Generation Alpha—born in the early 2010s and onward— in the Netherlands.

A major methodological contribution of Co-Alpha is the collection of a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of 5,000 immigrant and native youth aged 14–15 across 50 schools, including their parents. This panel survey includes measures of interethnic friendships (using complete social network data), interethnic attitudes, perceived discrimination, social isolation, loneliness, and trust. Uniquely, we will link this Co-Alpha school survey to the earlier CILS4EU study from 2010 (which I co-led), enabling the analysis of how cohesion among immigrant and native youth has evolved over nearly two decades. The survey will also be linked to a custom-built experimental social media platform and population-wide Dutch register data. In line with Open Science principles, all anonymized data will be made publicly available.