Interracial Friendships in College

Braz Camargo (), Ralph Stinebrickner and Todd Stinebrickner

No 20106, University of Western Ontario, Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP) Working Papers from University of Western Ontario, Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP)

Abstract: Motivated by the reality that the bene?ts of diversity on a college campus will be mitigated if interracial interactions are scarce or super?cial, previous work has strived to document the amount of interracial friendship interaction and to examine whether policy can influence this amount. In this paper we take advantage of unique longitudinal data from the Berea Panel Study to build on this previous literature by providing direct evidence about the amount of interracial friendships at different stages of college and by providing new evidence about some of the possible underlying reasons for the observed patterns of interaction. We ?find that, while much sorting exists at all stages of college, black and white students are, in reality, very compatible as friends; randomly assigned roommates of different races are as likely to become friends as randomly assigned roommates of the same race. Further, we fi?nd that, in the long-run, white students who are randomly assigned black roommates have a signi?cantly larger proportion of black friends than white students who are randomly assigned white roommates, even when the randomly assigned roommates are not included in the calculation of the proportions. This last result contradicts previous ?findings in the literature.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context=economicscibc (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: Interracial Friendships in College (2010)
Working Paper: Interracial Friendships in College (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uwo:hcuwoc:20106

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://economics.uw ... itting_ordering.html
The price is Paper copy available by mail at a cost of $10.00 Canadian each.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Western Ontario, Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP) Working Papers from University of Western Ontario, Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP) Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP), Social Science Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().