In plain language
Does feeling discriminated against hurt a young person's wellbeing in the same way everywhere, or does it depend on how much discrimination their friends feel? This study asked whether friendship groups act as a "frame of reference" — whether youth feel better or worse depending on how their own experience of discrimination compares with that of the people around them. The researchers surveyed 898 high school students (average age about 14) from three ethnically diverse, low socioeconomic-status public schools in New South Wales, Australia; 46% were White, 20% Indigenous, and 34% from other minority backgrounds.
Rather than treating friendship groups as neat, separate cliques, the team used a state-of-the-art link-clustering algorithm to identify overlapping friendship communities — recognizing that real students belong to multiple, intersecting groups at once — and then used Bayesian multiple-membership multilevel models to test whether the discrimination level of a student's communities changed the link between their own felt discrimination and their wellbeing.
The results supported the frame-of-reference idea. In friendship communities where overall felt discrimination was low, an individual's own level of felt discrimination made little difference to wellbeing. But in communities where discrimination was high, individuals who personally felt less discrimination than their peers had better subjective wellbeing than those who felt more — and this held regardless of ethnicity. Consistent with prior Australian research, Indigenous students and other ethnic minorities reported feeling more discrimination than White students. The findings suggest that understanding — and intervening on — discrimination and youth wellbeing requires looking at the friendship communities young people are embedded in, not just at individuals.
Key findings
- The study provides the first evidence of a frame-of-reference effect for discrimination: a young person's wellbeing depended on their relative standing in felt discrimination within their friendship communities.
- When friendship community-level discrimination was low, individual-level felt discrimination showed no reliable wellbeing cost or benefit.
- When community-level discrimination was high, individuals who felt low discrimination themselves had better subjective wellbeing than those who felt high discrimination.
- The frame-of-reference effect held regardless of ethnicity.
- Indigenous students and students from other ethnic minorities reported significantly more felt discrimination than White students, consistent with prior Australian research.
- Methodologically, the study combined a link-clustering algorithm for detecting overlapping friendship communities with Bayesian multiple-membership multilevel models, accounting for students' membership in several communities at once.
How to cite
APA
Sahdra, B. K., Ciarrochi, J., Parker, P. D., Craven, R., Brockman, R., Devine, E. K., Conigrave, J., & Chang, D. F. (2020). Discrimination as a frame-of-reference effect in overlapping friendship communities of ethnically diverse youth. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 26(1), 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1037/cdp0000247
BibTeX
@article{sahdra2020discrimination,
author = {Sahdra, Baljinder K. and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Parker, Philip D. and Craven, Rhonda and Brockman, Robert and Devine, Emma K. and Conigrave, James and Chang, Doris F.},
title = {Discrimination as a Frame-of-Reference Effect in Overlapping Friendship Communities of Ethnically Diverse Youth},
journal = {Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology},
year = {2020},
volume = {26},
number = {1},
pages = {71--81},
doi = {10.1037/cdp0000247}
}
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- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
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Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.