Varieties of Group Threat: Ethnic Group Position, Individual-Level Status, and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Atac, Ibrahim Enes
- Graduate Program:
- Sociology (MA)
- Degree:
- Master of Arts
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- September 29, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Charles Seguin, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Gary J Adler, Jr., Committee Member
Michelle Frisco, Program Head/Chair
Daniel Joseph Della Posta, Committee Member
Brandon Gorman (Outside Member), Special Signatory - Keywords:
- intergroup relations
anti-immigrant sentiments
group threat
ethnicity
migration
race
minority groups - Abstract:
- Sociological explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment focus on group threat, or threats to the perceived or actual position of one’s ethnic group. Studies often theorize or measure group threat only by considering the perspective of majority groups toward immigrants, which implicitly assumes that majority and minority groups tend to react to changes in structural- and individual-level factors the same way. Using data from European Social Survey and Ethnic Power Relations, I examine how interactions between ethnic group and individual-level status indicators contribute to the formation of attitudes toward immigrants. The results suggest that, on average, majority groups tend to have more anti-immigrant sentiments than minority groups. Furthermore, I find that changes in levels of education, income, and occupation significantly influence both the attitudes of majority and minority group members, but with stronger effects for majority group members. Results are largely consistent whether or not immigrant groups come from the same ethnic group as the majority and also even for ethnolinguistic minority groups that have been residing in these respective countries for centuries. Finally, I discuss how these findings provide theoretical implications on the need for incorporating minority groups into future research and theorizing group threat to capture the different levels of interaction between ethnic group position and individual-level status.