Intergroup, Intragroup, and Changing Best Friendships: Implications for Prejudice and Attitudes Toward Integration in Ethnic Majority and Minority Adolescents

Background

In increasingly diverse societies, adolescents regularly interact with peers from different ethnic backgrounds in their daily lives. Despite these opportunities for contact, ethnic majority and minority youth often remain socially segregated, and prejudice continues to persist. Best friendship ties among adolescents from different ethnic backgrounds may play an important role in fostering more positive intergroup attitudes during adolescence. However, few studies have investigated the stability of different types of best friendships (i.e., intragroup, intergroup) in adolescence, and whether they influence the development of intergroup attitudes during this life phase. This longitudinal study examines the extent to which intragroup and intergroup best friendships remain stable throughout adolescence, and how such stability is intertwined with the development of prejudice and attitudes toward integration among ethnic majority and ethnic minority adolescents in the Italian context.

Method

Data for the current study were drawn from the cohort-sequential longitudinal project IDENTITIES “Managing identities in diverse societies: A developmental intergroup perspective with adolescents”. The sample consisted of 1,227 adolescents (M_age = 15.67 years, SD = 1.20; 47.34% female), of whom 82.56% were from the ethnic majority background, and 17.44% were from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Results

First, chi-square analyses revealed significant differences in friendship types between ethnic majority and ethnic minority adolescents.  

Furthermore, multigroup latent growth curve analyses further showed that friendship type was unrelated to the development of attitudes toward integration but was associated with the development of prejudice. At the total sample level, adolescents showed moderately high initial levels of prejudice, with a light curvilinear developmental trend over time, characterized by a slight initial decrease followed by a slight increase. Regarding different best friendship types, adolescents with stable intragroup best friendships showed the highest initial levels of intergroup prejudice, and these levels remained relatively stable over time. In contrast, adolescents with stable intergroup best friendships exhibited the lowest initial levels of prejudice and showed a more pronounced quadratic pattern of change over time. Adolescents whose best friendship type changed exhibited levels of prejudice that consistently fell between those of the other two groups throughout the study period.

Conclusion

Ethnic-majority adolescents were more likely to maintain stable intragroup best friendships. In contrast, the ethnic minorities were more likely to maintain stable intergroup best friendships or to change their friendship type over time. Adolescents displayed distinct developmental trajectories of prejudice depending on the type and stability of their best friendships, whereas this relational characteristic did not shape the development of attitudes toward integration. These findings underscore the importance of stable intergroup friendships in preventing the development of negative intergroup attitudes in multicultural societies.