Abstract
Decades of research have confirmed and delimited the effects of interracial contact on racial attitudes. A shortcoming of this literature is its framing of interracial contact as a counterweight to homophily. Accordingly, researchers often measure interracial contact at the same-race/different-race boundary, such as in friendships and dating relationships. Rather than asking whether any interracial friendship leads to any interracial dating, I ask how much crossing a specific boundary actually leads to crossing other boundaries. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), I investigate the consequences of early interracial friendship for later interracial dating across six racial boundaries. The results show that interracial contact with a specific group increases the likelihood of interracial contact primarily with that same group and rarely with other groups. I conclude with implications for future research as well as social policy that relies on interracial contact.
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Source: Appendix Table 3. These panels present the predicted probabilities of three relationship-history outcomes at six boundaries, contingent on respondents’ proportion of group-A friends. Each line represents the Monoracial respondents who in Wave I grew up in English-dominant homes, lived in census tracts with the mean proportion of same-race residents, attended schools with the mean proportion of same-race students and at the mean for network segregation, nominated the mean number of friends, did not have interracial romantic relationships with group-A partners, and who by Wave IV, had not received Bachelors degrees, had not been in criminal justice detainment, had the mean number of romantic relationships, had not had same-gender relationships, and had Wave IV relationship rosters covering fewer years than the years since Wave I. The thick lines highlight the boundary-specific effects of contact
Source: Appendix Table 3. These panels present the predicted probabilities of three relationship-history outcomes at six boundaries, contingent on respondents’ proportion of group-A friends. Each line represents the multiracial respondents with the same characteristics as the Monoracials in Fig. 1. The thick lines highlight the boundary-specific effects of contact
Source: Appendix Table 3. These panels present the predicted probabilities of four relationship-history outcomes at six boundaries, contingent on respondents’ proportion of group-A friends. Each line represents respondents with the same characteristics as in Fig. 1. The thick lines highlight the boundary-specific effects of contact (Color figure online)
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Notes
I capitalize all race categories to avoid naturalizing “whites” and “blacks,” and I use Latinx to avoid using the masculine “Latino” as gender neutral.
Add Health possesses other limitations. Besides the absence of data on early racial attitudes and insufficient power to analyze same-gender dating, Add Health also does not have indicators of having a multiracial extended family or friendship-nomination data for adulthood, which would permit examination of whether young adults select adult friends that resemble adolescent friends, regardless of whether adult dating partners arise from friendship networks (as debated in: Connolly, Furman, and Konarski 2000; Kreager et al., 2016).
I also conducted an exploratory analysis of different specifications of interracial friendship using AIC/BIC model fit criteria: (a) any group-A friends, (b) only group-A friends, (c) group-A/non-group-A heterogeneity, and (d) proportion group-A friends. In every comparison, the AIC and BIC values preferred the gradational measures to the dichotomized measures of interracial friendship by at least 7 points. These results indicate that the effects of interracial contact are more than the “threshold” effect of having any group-A friends. I use the proportion group-A measure as it is simpler to interpret than the heterogeneity measure.
I classify respondents as non-Latinx if only their Latinx responses were missing and as Latinx if only their race responses were missing.
Among Add Health respondents with one or more pairs of racial/ethnic information, Shiao (2019) finds that most inconsistent identifiers switch between Multiracial self-classification and single-race self-classification in different panels, and they recommend placing these respondents in the Multiracial category along with the smaller population of consistently Multiracial identifiers. Indeed 16% have multiple, changed, or other-race identifications, a percentage more than double the largest percentage of multiple-race responders in any single panel. In brief, the instability of Multiracial identification leads to the underreporting of Mulitiraciality in cross-sectional data (Doyle & Kao, 2007a).
Had I used group A as the reference group, my models would estimate either the effects of interracial friendships with group A relative to group A’s odds of interracial dating with any other groups (i.e., in the intercept) or the effect of friendship with group A regardless of whether they were interracial friendships or same-race friendships in the case of group A.
Controlling for group size is standard in intermarriage research to avoid conflating social distance with opportunity for endogamy (Kalmijn, 1998). I extend this standard to control for opportunities for racial homophily in friendship.
I use school-level segregation to control for aggregate variations in interracial trust beyond immediate friendships.
I recognize these controls only reduce the possibility that a predisposition for contact makes both interracial friendship and interracial dating more likely.
Add Health’s sample of consistent and exclusive Native identifiers is too small for making reliable estimates; nevertheless, I include them as a reminder of their marginalization in racial/ethnic sociology (Glenn, 2015).
Gsem is the only Stata command that permits multilevel, multinomial modeling; however, Stata only provides goodness of fit statistics useful for comparing gsem models (i.e., AIC and BIC) and not for assessing a single model, unlike for its associated command sem which however only estimates linear structural equation models.
The Asian x Female and Native x Female interactions are excluded for one outcome to allow the Black/non-Black boundary model to converge.
Byrd (2017) uses a similar approach to estimate the effects of group-A friends on group-A contacts including dating; however, their results are not comparable with mine or most of the literature, in part because their models only include interracial friendships as a covariate for their preferred variable, self-reported closeness with group A, which is a primary mechanism for the effects of friendship.
At the White/non-White boundary, in the models for non-marriage non-cohabitation relationships, the negative effect of White friends on interracial dating with other non-White groups (general effect) increases substantially though it remains smaller than the positive effect of White friends on interracial dating exclusively with Whites (specific effect). At the Native/non-Native boundary, the specific effects of Native friends become smaller and non-significant in the models for marriages and non-marriage non-cohabitation relationships; that said, these non-significant specific effects remain larger than the (also non-significant) general effects in the same models.
In additional analyses (not shown), I find Latinx respondents are the principal non-Whites who report interracial dating exclusively with Whites and the principal non-Blacks who report interracial dating exclusively with Blacks, consistent with intermarriage patterns (Saenz & Morales, 2015). Future research should examine whether friendships with Latinxs bridge the networks of Whites and Blacks.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Aaron Gullickson for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.
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Shiao, J.L. Beyond Homophily: The Boundary-Specific Effects of Interracial Contact. Race Soc Probl 16, 211–229 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-024-09411-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-024-09411-3