Mixing pupils by race leads to more interracial marriages, finds research

Racial diversity in schools can lead to positive changes in behaviour towards people of other races, academics say
29th March 2018, 11:00am

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Mixing pupils by race leads to more interracial marriages, finds research

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/mixing-pupils-race-leads-more-interracial-marriages-finds-research
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White pupils who have more black contemporaries at school are more likely to date and marry black people as adults, according to new research.

This, according to the research, is not because former pupils have better opportunities to meet people from other races through friendship networks they developed at school.

It is because diversity at school changes people’s attitudes and behaviour towards people of other races, the research concludes.

The report comes as the Department for Education has been drawing up plans that could force schools to help pupils to mix with children from different backgrounds, as part of an Integrated Communities Strategy.

The researchers compared different white students within the same school, contrasting those who happened to be part of cohorts with fewer black people with those in cohorts with more black people.

They found that the higher the share of black students of the same gender in a year group, the more likely it was that a white pupil would have a black partner during adulthood.

This trend was consistent regardless of an individual’s social network.

Racial diversity in schools ‘impacts attitudes’

The paper says: “Overall, therefore, our results suggest that racial diversity in schools impacts individuals’ attitudes or beliefs, which, in turn, affects their decisions regarding relationships.”

It adds: “This indicates that policies designed to increase racial diversity in schools may be effective in reducing racial prejudices and encouraging social integration more generally.”

The researchers note that interracial marriage is still “surprisingly rare,” and that previous research suggests adults prefer to date people of their own race. 

The research, which took place in the United States and was based on 20,000 students, is being presented at the Royal Economic Society annual conference at the University of Sussex this week.

The study has been carried out by academics from the University of Antwerp, Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg and the Paris school of Economics.

Taking data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, the research used information on the race of students within surveyed schools and who they had dated and married more than a decade later.

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