Title: Exploring the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity, intergroup relations and stress
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Demographic trends reveal that societies have become more ethnically diverse, and the implications of this have received much scholarly attention - focusing particularly on critical societal variables such as economic performance and neighbourhood trust. Today's increasing diversity poses challenges as people are having contact with new cultures, norms, and values, or avoiding such encounters. Some argue that group competition and conflict is inevitable, and existing research has investigated the effects on subjective perceptions (e.g. trust). However, we will explore whether living in diverse areas has detectable effects on people's biomarkers capturing levels of inflammation and chronic stress. The project will analyse the self-reported data together with the biological blood data contained in two major British surveys that have tracked individuals over time - Understanding Society and the National Child Development Study - and use sophisticated statistical methods (i.e., longitudinal, multilevel and structural equation modelling techniques). The findings will help identify risk factors as well as positive aspects of diversity that will inform leaders and policy makers in planning responses to the broad range of diversity-related challenges. We will explore these issues using a longitudinal, collaborative, interdisciplinary and policy-focused approach to investigate how ethnic diversity influences biological stress responses, and how positive and negative experiences of contact and threat influence the relationship. Our research team, which includes investigators and advisors from the University of Birmingham, University of Oxford, University of York, University of Manchester, and Department for Communities and Local Government, has extensive experience to address the following questions: 1. Is the ethnic diversity of local areas associated with higher or lower levels of stress? We are interested in exploring the link between the ethnic diversity of areas and stress responses and whether these patterns vary by ethnicity. Some argue that diversity leads to competition, threat and poorer intergroup relations; and we will analyse biological stress responses to these circumstances. We will also explore the effect that other features of neighbourhoods have on stress, including social deprivation, social inequality, etc. 2. What role do negative (e.g. threat and crime) and positive (e.g. intergroup contact) correlates of diversity play? We will explore if negative factors that affect stress (e.g., discrimination and crime) are mitigated by positive factors (e.g., contact, trust, and safety). We will explore the impact of threat and intergroup contact on stress responses, focusing on trust, crime, safety, discrimination and social network composition. We will explicitly focus on the pathways of biological stress outcomes. 3. Does the way we measure ethnic diversity have an impact on the findings? We will incorporate the latest research developments that demonstrate that different measures of diversity yield different theoretical predictions and empirical results. We will test these findings in our analyses of stress markers. 4. What is the best way to address the effects of diversity, threat and contact, and what is their relationship to other factors such as social deprivation and poverty? We will use our findings and feedback from our advisory group to build an evidence base to reflect and inform how these diversity and deprivation-related issues could be utilised by policy makers and government officials. If neighbourhood deprivation has more negative effects than diversity, recommendations can be made to improve socioeconomic circumstances in those areas. We will disseminate the project outputs to a wide audience using diverse dissemination and impact activities, including: scientific publications, policy briefings, press releases, dissemination events and webpage content.


Research activity codes: 2.1 BIOLOGICAL AND ENDOGENOUS FACTORS;2.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS
Health categories: INFLAMMATORY AND IMMUNE SYSTEM;MENTAL HEALTH