There is a limited theoretical and empirical literature on the role of friendship quality and interracial contact on adolescent racial prejudice development. To address this gap, the present study examined the relationship between these factors amongst an Australian sample of 89 school-aged adolescent friendship dyads and 80 university-aged adolescent friendship dyads. All participants were administered questionnaires measuring prejudice towards Asian and Arab Australians, friendship quality and interracial contact. Overall, the results revealed that all adolescents reported significantly higher levels of subtle prejudice than blatant prejudice. As predicted, university-aged adolescents reported significantly lower levels of both subtle and blatant prejudice towards Asian and Arab Australians than school-aged adolescents. Importantly, adolescents who had contact with Asian (outgroup) friends reported significantly lower levels of subtle and blatant prejudice towards Asian Australians than adolescents with no Asian friends. Interestingly, friendship quality was not found to moderate the similarity of prejudice levels within friendship dyads. Together, these findings indicate that in developing subtle prejudice-reduction programs research should focus on increasing interracial cooperative contact, particularly amongst school-aged adolescents.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	racial prejudice
Research Division:	Psychology
Research Group:	Social and personality psychology
Research Field:	Social psychology
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding knowledge in psychology
UTAS Author:	Wootton, BM (Dr Bethany Wootton)
ID Code:	93562
Year Published:	2009
Web of Science® Times Cited:	26
Deposited By:	Psychology
Deposited On:	2014-08-08
Last Modified:	2015-03-05
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