of host communities to receive and integrate refugees. This is especially important within East Africa, where communal conflict has sometimes taken places between refugees and host communities and exclusionary refugee policies have sometimes been justified with recourse to public opinion. While a range of hypotheses exist relating to the determinants of social cohesion (e.g. labour market competition hypothesis, fiscal burden hypothesis, and group threat hypothesis), contact theory offers a potential avenues for designing policies and programmes at the local level. For example, it may shed light on whether including refugees and host communities alongside one another within assistance programmes or settlement design offers a means to improve social cohesion. Furthermore, applying contact theory to social cohesion within an East African context offers a means to examine whether and to what extent research findings within the ‘North’ apply similarly or differently within the ‘South’.

The underlying research draws upon first-hand quantitative data collected in urban and – camp-like contexts in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia (n=16,608) the Refugee Economies Dataset. Survey questionnaires included modules relating to host community attitudes towards refugees and vice versa, as well as the type and frequency of inter-group interaction. Our analysis primarily focuses on Uganda, because we have survey data on host community interactions with refugees for this country but not for the others. When relevant and feasible, we also present descriptive statistics and regressions using data from the three countries, in order to enable some level of comparison and generalization. We triangulate quantitative results with qualitative data. In addition to describing the patterns and correlates of attitudes towards refugees across all three countries, the research uses ordinary least squares (OLS) and instrumental variable (IV) regressions to explore the complex relationships between individual perceptions, refugee-host interactions, and group perceptions using data from Uganda.<sup>3</sup> Based on this, the paper complements the existing literature on contact theory by being among the first to explore the role of interaction in shaping host community attitudes towards refugees in a developing country context.

OLS regressions identify a positive and significant correlation between refugee-host interaction and the perception of hosts towards refugees. However, the results of OLS regressions could be biased by reverse causality in the relationship between attitudes and refugee-host interaction, by omitted variables, and by mismeasurement issues. To address endogeneity issues, we use a technique called an ‘instrumental variable approach’. We instrument the measure of host interactions with refugees by 1) the share of refugees living in the locality and 2) the intensity of refugee-host interactions among other household and community members. Effective F-tests and Sargan-Hansen tests for over-identifying restrictions suggest that these instruments are valid.

With IV regressions, the association between attitudes and refugee-host interaction dis-

> 3This is because the Refugee Economies Dataset only has data relating to host community interactions with refugees for Uganda, although it has data relating to refugee and host community perceptions and refugees’ interactions with the host community for all three countries.

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