Intergroup contact is lauded as one of the most effective interventions for reducing prejudice and improving intergroup relations. However, there remain a number of significant challenges with the existing evidence base, including the durability of these effects, the effectiveness of contact between ethnic groups in post-conflict contexts, and how easily we can generalise from experimental settings to real-world.
In this study, we attempt to address some of these challenges by exploiting a quasi-experimental setting provided by the education system of Northern Ireland, and using over two decades of survey data spanning individuals from more than four generations, with a broad range of questions on social, political and personal aspects of intergroup relations.
The analysis provides further support to a growing literature highlighting the potential limits of intergroup contact. Whilst we find some positive effects on important measures of social life, there are no discernible effects on attitudes towards personal relationships, and more surprisingly, no positive impact on political attitudes. This suggests that intergroup contact can have an important impact on social attitudes, softening attitudes and breaking down barriers in social life, however, there are clearly also significant limits of intergroup contact on political and personal attitudes in fraught post-conflict setting such as Northern Ireland.
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