The SOCIALBOND project synthesized work from sociology, social psychology, group diversity research, and network science. Our empirical analyses used existing panel data on students’ social networks, most importantly from the “Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in 4 European Countries” (CILS4EU), which covered more than 900 Dutch, English, German, and Swedish classrooms in 2010 and 2011. We also conducted a regional three-wave panel study of more than 3000 students in 39 schools in Germany that implemented novel measures of students’ social networks, trust, and identities.
To introduce smartphone-based experience sampling as a new method into the study of immigrant incorporation, we set up three smartphone-based surveys. In spring 2021, we interviewed 291 students from our school-based panel over four weeks. In winter 2021, we approached the same students to participate in another wave of experience sampling. This allows for analyses that relate variability in everyday experiences to students’ network embeddedness and school contexts. The two waves also provide the opportunity to compare students' social relations and well-being while they were forced to stay at home during spring's lockdown and after having returned to school. Results show that meeting friends in person – rather than only online – was strongly associated with a more positive mood. We communicated this result in a press release, which was taken up by several media outlets. We also conducted an additional, more intensive experience sampling study with a separate adult sample of Syrian, Polish, and Turkish immigrants to Germany.
Analyses of the new survey data focused on inter-personal trust in the school context and the extent to which ethnicity plays a role for adolescents' identities and social cognition, among other questions. Our new data also include a subsample of schools for which we have comparable data before and after the influx of refugees around 2015, allowing us to examine how new immigrant groups become integrated into their school grades.
The project produced several new insights on the role of the school context. For example, we showed that ethnic inequality in access to prestigious schools affects minority students’ identities and social relations. In areas where minority students rarely attend prestigious schools, their attendance at these schools is associated with assimilative tendencies and pressures. Educational policies that reduce ethnic stratification across schools could ease social life at school for high-performing minority students. At the same time, our research suggests that school reforms changing tracked school systems into more comprehensive school systems may have a weaker desegregating impact than expected. The reason is that stronger between-school ability tracking is not only associated with stronger ethnic sorting but also limits the ability of majority members to avoid exposure to minority members.
Our research identified new ways in which schools can strengthen social cohesion. Most importantly, we showed that school administrators can affect identity formation by making sure that gender and ethnic boundaries crisscross each other when admitting students to schools and when assigning them to classrooms. These findings were summarized in a Policy Brief, press releases, radio interviews, and via a podcast appearance.
Another set of results suggests that ethnicity plays a smaller and sometimes different role than assumed in most previous research on diversity in the school context. We showed that physical fighting between students of different ethnic origin is relatively rare. Moreover, it is particularly infrequent in schools where students tend to befriend mainly co-ethnics. Hence, incidences of physical fighting are rather a by-product of increased contact than group-based animosities. In addition to public talks, these results were disseminated via a press release and taken up by several media outlets.
