Organised leisure activities as arenas of social integration

Research problem and specific questionsAs societies are increasingly ethnically diverse, social integration is of increasing importance. Meaningful intergroup contact is known to promote the development of positive intergroup attitudes and relationships. Among children and youth, schools provide an essential arena for such contact.

Increasingly, organised leisure activities (OAs) are framed as an additional arena of intergroup contact, with conditions especially conducive for promoting social integration.

However, for the potential of OAs to come into fruition, a number of structural barriers needs to be transcended.The project aims to examine the extent to which OA-participants experience intergroup contact within the OAs they participate in and whether such intergroup contact co-vary with the establishment of intergroup friendships.

As one likely important factor limiting intergroup contact in OAs is the lower participation rate among children and youth of ethnic minority and lower socioeconomic background, the project also aims to improve our knowledge of how such differences come to exist.Data and methodThe project use rich information from children, parents, and register data, drawn from three nationally representative surveys: The Survey of Living Conditions (ULF), the Level-of-Living Survey (LNU), and the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in four European Countries (CILS4EU).Societal relevance and utilisationThe project provides information about the extent to which organised leisure activities function as arenas of intergroup contact.

Results from the project thus provide information about how policies aiming to promote social integration though OAs would need to be constructed.

Similarily, an improved understanding of the underlying causes of inequality in children´s OA-participation is important for reaching policy objectives regarding all children and youth’s access to meaningful leisure.Plan for project realisationThe project runs for three years, from February 2024 to December 2026 and will be located to the Level-of-Living research group at the Swedish Institute for Social Research.

Costs of the project predominantly cover salary for the principal investigator and acquisition of ULF and Child-ULF data from Statistics Sweden.