Author:

Keywords:

prejudice, intergenerational similarity, family socialization, adolescents, parenting styles

Abstract:

The mechanisms behind the consistent finding of intergenerational similarity in prejudice between parents and adolescents remains a ‘black box’. The present study aims to extend previous research that predominantly focused on the size of intergenerational similarity in prejudice and its moderators, by focusing on the mechanisms that underlie intergenerational similarity. We examine how family socialization processes can explain parent-child similarity in prejudice, and test if our model holds for prejudice toward multiple groups: immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals, and women. We take the adolescents’ own intergroup experiences into account in order to distinguish the unique contribution of family socialization, i.e. degree of open communication within the family, an authoritarian parenting style, a positive relation with the parents, and parenting values. We make use of the ParentChild Socialization Study 2013, which is a representative survey of 1,536 majority group family triads with direct measures of 16-year old adolescents and both their parents. Structural equation modeling revealed a mediating effect of parenting values between the parent’s prejudice and their child’s prejudice for most groups. The extent to which parents lay the emphasis on hard values (i.e. ambition, working hard, independence, and obedience) or soft values (i.e. tolerance, respect, and solidarity) was a significant mediator for intergenerational similarity in prejudice toward immigrants, Muslims, and women, but not for homosexuals. Hence, not the parenting style as such, but the content of an adolescent’s upbringing is a significant underlying mechanism of intergenerational similarity in prejudice.