Can Extracurricular Activities Reduce Adolescent Race/Ethnic Friendship Network Segregation? Institutional Repository Document uri icon

abstract

  • Racial/ethnic friendship segregation among adolescents has negative consequences throughout the life course. Extracurricular activities (ECAs) within high schools offer the capacity to bring diverse adolescents together and promote friendships that reduce outgroup prejudices. Despite their promise, only a few researchers have tested the effects of ECAs on racial/ethnic friendship segregation. We consider two prominent theories that offer insight into the processes by which ECAs might affect intergroup friendship. It is important that we consider these theories in conjunction as they make diverging predictions regarding the effect of ECAs on racial/ethnic friendship segregation. Focus theory contends that activities attract relatively homogenous subsets of the student body, thereby promoting friendship homophily (e.g., racial friendship segregation). By contrast, intergroup contact theory suggests ECAs can decrease homophily by offering opportunities for familiarization and engagement with peers who are dissimilar. In this chapter, we examine these seemingly contradictory processes and explain how, in fact, they can occur in tandem. At the macro level, ECAs can promote homophily by homogenizing the pool of available friends, whereas at the micro level, ECAs can decrease the relative salience of attributes such as race/ethnicity during friend selection. Our analysis uses data on friendships and participation in 30 ECAs from 108 schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. We found that around 60% of the ECAs were more homogenous than the broader school context in which they are embedded, with systematic differences by activity type. With a few notable exceptions, ECAs did not predict preferences for homophily. But, ECAs did predict the frequency of cross-group friendships, and thus, may provide many of the desired benefits of integration despite not producing short-term changes in friendship preferences. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical, methodological, and policy implications of these findings.

author list (cited authors)

  • Schaefer, D. R., Simpkins, S. D., & Ettekal, A. V.

citation count

  • 0

complete list of authors

  • Schaefer, David R||Simpkins, Sandra D||Ettekal, Andrea Vest

Book Title

  • OSF Preprints

publication date

  • October 2016