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Article Excerpt
In 2002, a total of 187,131 foreign students studied at universities in Germany, accounting for 10.4% of the total student population. In the same year, 18,947 visiting academics worked at university departments in Germany (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, 2003). In the UK, overseas students made up 11.1% of the total student population in the academic year 2000/01 (Whitaker's Almanac, 2003). Attending university or being a visiting academic in another country involves challenges of adaptation to a new cultural environment, not just in the academic world, but more generally with respect to everyday life in the host country (Crano & Crano, 1993; Stroebe, van Vliet, Hewstone, & Willis, 2002). Among these challenges, facing prejudice and hostility against foreigners is of particular significance to visitors' satisfaction and well-being. Many Western countries have been facing problems of widespread hostility against foreigners. Germany and the UK are two countries that have had to deal with a disturbing number of incidents of violence against foreigners. In some of these cases, visiting students or academics have become targets of violence and ethnocentrically-motivated abuse. Increasingly, this problem is perceived as affecting the attractiveness of the respective countries to international visitors. Responding to this problem, research funding agencies and universities have taken measures to facilitate the integration of visiting students and academics into the host society. In Germany, for example, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation started an initiative in 2002 to award a prize to the most friendly immigration office, as nominated by their international fellows. In addition, a new interest group for foreign students in Germany (Bundesverband auslandischer Studierender) was founded in 2001.
The widespread perception of the need to tackle the problem of discrimination against visiting students and academics is based largely on individual cases receiving media attention and on anecdotal reports. There is little systematic evidence documenting the extent to which this target group reports experiences of discrimination, either in Germany or in the UK. The present research was a first step towards addressing this gap. Perceived discrimination on the basis of foreign nationality was measured in three samples from two countries: visiting students and visiting academics in Germany, and visiting students in the UK. The objective of the study was to contribute to the literature on perceived discrimination in several ways:
(1) Providing prevalence rates of perceived discrimination by international students and academics (i.e. groups that are clearly different from the prototype of foreigners coming to the respective host country for economic or political reasons);
(2) Employing a fine-grained measure of perceived discrimination derived from Allport's (1954) classic work on prejudice that identified different levels of severity of perceived discrimination in terms of antilocution, avoidance, discrimination, and physical assault;
(3) Exploring predictors of perceived discrimination that indicate a special vulnerability or act as protective factors with respect to experiences of discrimination, such as foreign appearance, language proficiency, and quality of personal contacts with host nationals;
(4) Replicating the robust personal/group discrimination discrepancy (PGDD), that is, the tendency to perceive higher levels of discrimination for groups, as a whole, than for persons individually (Taylor, Wright, Porter, Zanna, & Olson, 1994). In the present study, the PGDD was examined outside the laboratory and in a population of people whose status as targets of discrimination is only temporary; that is, for the duration of their stay abroad.
Within social psychological research on prejudice, the initial focus on individuals holding prejudicial attitudes towards out-groups has been complemented by an interest in the individuals and groups who are the targets of such prejudicial attitudes and discriminating behaviours. This perspective, described by Dion (2001) as the 'phenomenology of prejudice and discrimination', focuses on the antecedents as well as the consequences of being discriminated against on the basis of group membership. A number of studies have examined perceived discrimination by minority members, using global questions such as, 'Have you ever been discriminated against because of your [race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, or other characteristic, such as body piercing]' (e.g. Jetten, Branscombe, Schmitt, & Spears, 2001; Operario & Fiske, 2001; Schmitt, Spears, & Branscombe, 2003; Taylor, Wright, Moghaddam, & Lalonde, 1990). Other studies have employed more detailed measures, addressing different dimensions (Gomez & Trierweiler, 1999; Klonoff & Landrine, 1995) or different contexts (e.g. Phinney, Madden, & Santos, 1998) of perceived discrimination.
In the present study, a new measure of perceived discrimination comprising four levels was derived from Allport's (1954) analysis of 'The Nature of Prejudice' to investigate visiting students' and academics' perceptions of discrimination in Germany and the UK. This measure provides a more fine-grained picture of the different manifestations of discrimination to which individuals feel exposed than the broad questions used in most previous research, and thus facilitates a more differentiated assessment of the scope and severity of discrimination. The four levels are: (1)
Antilocution -- this form of discrimination comprises verbal comments that 'betray antagonism' (Allport, 1954, p. 49). They include negative evaluative statements about foreigners, oversimplified forms of communication and patronizing comments highlighting the foreign person's inability to behave in accordance with norms and customs of the host country.
Avoidance -- at this level, discrimination consists in avoiding contact with members of the rejected groups, either at the macro level (e.g. avoiding places where meeting foreigners is likely), or at the micro level (e.g. avoiding eye contact with foreigners). Like antilocution, avoidance reflects an antagonism and is potentially hurtful to the target person, but does not involve immediate or physical harm.
Direct discrimination -- behaviours at this level involve the denial of equal treatment to members of the target group, excluding them from certain social rights and privileges. They can be shown by individual actors (e.g. a landlord's unwillingness to rent out a room to a foreign student), or they can be part of a social structure (e.g. university administrations passing on personal data about all male students from Islamic countries to police authorities in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks).
Physical assault -- this level comprises the threat or infliction of physical harm on a person because of his or her membership of a rejected out-group, and represents the most serious form of discrimination included in this study. Allport (1954) proposed that these levels represent a hierarchy of increasing severity, and that discrimination at a more severe level is often preceded or accompanied by behaviours on the lower levels. Allport's differentiation has been used to conceptualize discrimination against ethnic groups (Sherman, 1990), as well as against old people (Fraboni, Saltstone, & Hughes, 1990; Stuart-Hamilton & Mahoney, 2003).
In addition to measuring the prevalence of different forms of discrimination as perceived by visiting students and academics, a second aim of the study was to explore potential predictors of perceived discrimination. Previous research has focused on the psychological function of attributing negative treatment by other people to discrimination, highlighting the potential of such attributions to buffer the self against negative feedback (Major, Quinton, & McCoy, 2002). Consequently, predictors of perceived discrimination examined have mainly been conceptualized in terms of the ease with which negative feedback can be attributed to discrimination (e.g. by creating different levels of attributional ambiguity; Crocker, Voegl, Testa, & Major, 1991). In contrast, the present study was concerned with predictors of perceived discrimination that are linked more closely to the objective situation of the target groups as visitors to universities in a foreign country. Three potential predictors were selected on the basis of previous research into discrimination on the grounds of nationality, race, and gender.
First, visibility of out-group status has been identified as a critical predictor of perceived discrimination. Studies from North America showed that members of visible minorities, such as African-Americans, perceive themselves to be targets of discrimination to a far greater extent than members of non-visible out-groups (Dion, 2001; Pak, Dion, & Dion, 1991). Even within a particular group, differences in visibility of out-group status were found to predict perceived discrimination. Klonoff and Landrine (2000) found that darker-skinned Blacks were 11 times more likely to experience frequent racial discrimination than Blacks with lighter skin.
Based on Allport's (1954) contact hypothesis, quality of contacts with members of the host community was selected as a second predictor of perceived discrimination among visiting students and academics (see also Pettigrew, 1997). Good quality contacts with members of the host nation outside work and daily duties may indicate greater integration into, and participation in, the host culture. This may act as a buffer against perceived discrimination. Support for this view is provided by studies showing that positive contact is associated with lower levels of intergroup anxiety (Islam...
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