The salience of sport in cross-race friendship selection

Abstract

In response to growing racial concerns, stakeholders have called for programs that facilitate positive cross-race interactions. Adolescence has been targeted as the most effective life stage to initiate programs promoting relationships. Since schools are one of the primary social influences on adolescent development, they have been emphasized as a particularly important setting for promoting intergroup contact. Sport plays an important role in the experiences of students, and contributes to intergroup relations within a school. The purpose of this study is to examine the unique effect of sport participation on cross-race friendship selection. Using data from Wave I of The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), mixed-effects regression models and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to assess the effects of sport participation on friendship heterogeneity. Overall, participation in sport activities did not significantly influence the racial heterogeneity of adolescent’s friendship networks.

Youth Engagement, Positive Interethnic Contact, and ‘Associational Bridges’: A Quasi-Experimental Investigation of a UK National Youth Engagement Scheme

“…Single-site school studies (Aboud et al 2015), or studies using US state- (Knifsend and Juvonen 2017) or nationally-representative (Moody 2001) surveys of pupils, find young people involved in extra-curricular activities generally report more positive contact than their non-engaged peers. These studies also suggest as the diversity of one’s co-participants increases the amount of positive contact young people experience also increases, measured either directly, using self-reported indicators of co-participant diversity (Knifsend and Juvonen 2017), or proxied using statistical measures of school diversity (Jones et al 2016). Although, at the same time, ethnic segregation within groups/activities can still occur, even in diverse schools (Moody 2001).…”

Can Extracurricular Activities Reduce Adolescent Race/Ethnic Friendship Network Segregation?

“…All too often, studies of friendship segregation and its effects on development only consider one source of homophily. Studies focused on total homophily have found that the diversity of ECAs promoted friendship diversity (Jones et al, 2016;Knifsend and Juvonen, 2015). However, because they used a measure of total homophily, they were unable to distinguish whether the reductions in friendship segregation they observed were due to changes in preferences, or simply the greater availability of more diverse peers, a distinction with important theoretical and policy implications.…”

“…Research at different points in the life course has supported this hypothesis. For instance, adolescents participating in more heterogeneous activities have a greater proportion of friends from a different race/ethnicity (Jones et al 2016). Among adult co-workers, Feld (1982) found that the distribution of age within departments was strongly related to age similarity among friends.…”