Afternoon Seminars@CMIST - Peter Dinesen
| Dates: | 7 April 2015 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:15 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Peter Dinesen |
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In this Afternoon Seminars@CMIST event, Peter Dinesen from the University of Copenhagen will deliver a talk entitled "Putting attitudes into context: The role of the residential micro-context in shaping social trust and other attitudes".
Abstract:
Dating back more than a century, there has been a scholarly massive interest in the question of how residential context affects individuals' attitudes, perceptions, and behaviours. We add to this tradition by linking Danish survey data with flexible register-based data. These data allow us to flexibly generate contextual measures based on characteristics of surrounding individuals in contexts of any given size. One notable quality of this approach is that we can zoom in on the immediate residential micro-context of individual (e.g. within a radius of 80 meters of a given individual) instead of relying on highly aggregate contextual measures used in most research on contextual effects.
In the first study applying this approach we look at the effect of ethnic diversity in the micro-context on social trust. More specifically, we argue that residential exposure to ethnic diversity reduces social trust. Previous within-country analyses of the relationship have been ill-suited to study this relationship as they have been conducted at high levels of aggregation, thus ignoring substantial variation in actual exposure to ethnic diversity. In contrast, we analyse how ethnic diversity of the immediate micro-context-where interethnic exposure is inevitable-affects trust. We focus on contextual diversity within a radius of 80 meters of a given individual, but we also compare the effect in the micro-context to the impact of diversity in more aggregate contexts. Our results show that ethnic diversity in the micro-context affects trust negatively, whereas the effect vanishes in larger contextual units. This supports the conjecture that interethnic exposure underlies the negative relationship between ethnic diversity in residential contexts and social trust.
The presentation will conclude by discussing some more preliminary work on other attitudes and perceptions using the same data set.
No need to register; all welcome!
Speaker
Peter Dinesen
Role: Associate Professor
Organisation: University of Copenhagen
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
2.07
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
