Predictors of Attitudes Towards the Rights of Ethnic Minorities of Student Teenagers in a Romanian City

Journal of Social Research & Policy, Volume: 1, Issue: 2, Pages: 35-46

Date: December 2010

ISSN: 2067-2640 (print), 2068-9861 (electronic)

Abstract: The article will endeavor to build a causal model of ethnic attitudes of students in grades 8 to 12 from a great Transylvanian city with a large Hungarian population. The theoretical model built at the beginning of the study was tested applying multivariate statistical techniques to data of a survey of about 2500 teenagers. My results show that attitudes about the rights of members of minorities are attributable to both individual and contextual factors. On the one hand, gender, cognitive constraints and selfesteem play an important role in this attitudinal make up. On the other hand, the relative positions on in-group and out-group in the special context of interaction – in my case the classroom – are playing important parts in determining how strong the biases will be.

Keywords: Ethnic Attitudes, Romanians and Hungarians, Teenagers, Transylvania, Path Analysis