Interracial Friendships in Adolescence

Scholars have long viewed contact (or lack thereof) between different groups as an indicator of the social and geographic distance between them. They have also considered contact between different groups to be an important source of influence on attitudes and behavior. Brown v. Board of Education, which ended the legal segregation of schools, was based on the assumption that interracial contact is beneficial to the self-esteem and achievement of Black youth. This 1954 Supreme Court decision, and the decline in school and residential segregation that followed it, have motivated a number of studies on the causes and consequences of interracial friendship in adolescence. This entry summarizes the findings of recent studies on this topic and points to important directions for future research.

Adults and adolescents alike tend to befriend same-race others due to opportunities for same-race contact (propinquity) and preferences for contact with those who are similar to them (homophily). Studies typically assess preferences for same-race contact indirectly by examining patterns of interracial friendship after taking into account propinquity. Such an approach requires researchers to have information on the race of individuals who befriend each other, in addition to the racial composition of their social contexts, such as schools and workplaces.

Research focusing on friendships between adolescents of different racial groups has proliferated in the past decade largely due to the advent of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Add Health is an ongoing school-based study that was initiated by affiliates of the Carolina Population Center in the mid-1990s; the project has already interviewed a subset of respondents from its original sampling frame at three different points in time and is currently in the field collecting a fourth wave of data. Many of the Add Health studies on interracial friendship (and interracial romantic relationships) were conducted by Grace Kao and her colleagues with funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Importantly, Add Health administered a questionnaire to the student bodies of more than 100 schools in the United States. Including school rosters, the questionnaire asked students to identify their five best friends of each sex and to distinguish their very best friend. This design allows researchers to identify the characteristics of any friends nominated who attended the same school and also completed the questionnaire. Specifically, they can compare the self-reported race and ethnicity of students in friendship dyads. Surveys like Add Health offer more realistic estimates of interracial friendship than ones that simply ask respondents whether they have any friends of a different race.

Patterns of interracial friendship differ considerably according to race. Using data from Add Health, Ted Mouw and Barbara Entwisle find that 14.9 percent of friendships identified by Whites are interracial, whereas the comparable estimates for Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are 28.6, 66.5, and 57.7 percent, respectively. These dramatic racial differences are partly a reflection of the relative sizes of different racial groups within schools. Whites, for instance, have fewer opportunities and need for interracial contact than minorities because they typically attend schools in which they are the majority rather than the minority. At the same time, adolescents' actual likelihood of interracial friendship falls considerably below their expected likelihood on the basis of opportunities for contact, regardless of their race.

...