Contact and Prejudice Between Germans and Turks: A Correlational Study.

The article investigates the relationship between prejudice and intergroup contact for German and Turkish pupils aged 15 in the Federal Republic of Germany. It describes that the contact hypothesis proposed simply that association with persons from a disliked group leads to the growth of liking and respect for, or at least to decreased prejudice or antipathy toward that group. Intergroup contact occurs here against a background of increased numbers of migrant or guest workers It draws a distinction between opportunities for and real uses of contact, operationalized using path analysis, and hypotheses were tested concerning the way contact in the neighborhood, at school, and in leisure time is related to prejudice. It informs that leisure time contact was significantly correlated with reduced prejudice, but only for the German sample (N = 60); for the Turkish sample (N = 50), prejudice was unrelated to any of the measures of contact. It discusses results in terms of the wider social background to contact between national and migrant labor populations in Western Europe.