Prejudice in the classroom: a longitudinal analysis of anti-immigrant attitudes

This article analyses how the classroom context contributes to attitude change in adolescence. By analysing the relationship that the primary school classroom context has on anti-immigrant attitudes over time, it addresses the single factor fallacy that has troubled previous research on classrooms, which has largely tested the contact hypothesis. The dataset includes 849 participants over five-time points from 2010 to 2015. Findings show that over time individual’s anti-immigrant attitudes increased in classrooms with a higher average level of anti-immigrant sentiment net of the effect of classroom heterogeneity. However, this finding was true only while students were still enrolled in the same class over the first three waves of the study. After students entered high school, the classroom/time interaction effect disappears, suggesting that other contextual influences take over. This article highlights the crucial importance of classroom context on attitude development in adolescence.