AbstractTo make sound educational decisions, students and their parents have to be informed about the way the educational system works. Such knowledge, however, tends to vary across social groups. This study investigates the differences in education‐related knowledge between native and migrant mothers in the German context. Empirical analyses based on a sample of native German mothers and mothers from Turkey or the former Soviet Union (N = 2076) indicate that migrant mothers know less about the German educational system than their native counterparts. An investigation of the potential sources of these knowledge gaps shows that migrants' weaker socio‐economic status explains a substantial part of their lower level of knowledge, particularly among families of Turkish origin. Furthermore, migrants' less profitable social network composition and lower levels of German language skills contribute to their information deficits. Based on these empirical results, the study considers opportunities for improving the knowledge base of migrant parents.
Attitudes on whether immigrants should culturally adapt to their receiving society or maintain the customs of their origin context vary – not only between majority and minority populations but also within these groups. Focusing on adolescents in the German context, this study investigates whether such acculturation attitudes are shaped by the ethnic composition of a person's neighbourhood context. Building on arguments from theories of intergroup contact, concentration effects and reactive ethnicity, we expect different effects for minority and majority adolescents. To empirically investigate these expectations, we combine survey data on N = 4621 adolescents and their parents with geocoded information on the characteristics of their neighbourhood contexts. Exploiting an intergenerational set-up to account for neighbourhood selection, we find indication of neighbourhood effects among minority adolescents. Among majority youth, acculturation attitudes turn out to be unrelated to neighbourhood ethnic composition.
The influence of friends in shaping students' educational expectations has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in past research. However, few studies have directly tackled the methodological problems associated with estimating such influence effects. In particular, the separation of selection effects - with students selecting friends with similar educational expectations - from influence effects has remained elusive. In this study, we therefore investigate whether friend influence persists once we account for selection effects and other confounding network-related processes. In addition, we quantify the contribution of selection and influence to the similarity of educational expectations among friends. We rely on two-wave longitudinal data on 1,821 German secondary school students in 77 classrooms and multilevel random-coefficients stochastic actor-oriented models for the coevolution of networks and behaviour. Our results demonstrate that both selection and influence contribute to expectation-based similarity and that selection effects are substantial. This shows that without explicitly accounting for selection, estimates of friend influence effects are likely to be biased.
Gender-related religious norms, such as endogamy and chastity norms, are widely recognized for their influence on the romantic relationships of religious youth. However, much less is known about whether these norms also have consequences on social interaction beyond romantic relationships, and on friendship-making in particular. In this dissertation, I study Muslim youth in Germany to investigate how endogamy and chastity norms affect their friendship-making. In the first part of the dissertation, I investigate the impact of endogamy norms on the interreligious friendships of Muslim boys and girls. Building on past research, which finds endogamy norms to be stronger among Muslim girls than boys, I ask whether these norms not only complicate Muslim girls' interreligious romantic relationships but also their interreligious friendships, compared to Muslim boys. Applying longitudinal social network methods to large-scale network survey data on youth in German schools, I find that Muslim girls indeed engage less in interreligious friendships than Muslim boys. This disparity in interreligious friendship-making does not appear until adolescence, when endogamy norms become more salient. While other factors do not substantially contribute to the gender gap in Muslim youths' interreligious friendships, I find that accounting for endogamy norms explains up to two-thirds of the gap in the interreligious friendships of Muslim girls and boys. I find no evidence that the friendship-making behavior of non-Muslim youth contributes to the gender gap. In the second part of the dissertation, I investigate the consequences of chastity norms on Muslim youths' cross-gender friendship-making. In social network analyses based on large-scale survey data, I find that cross-gender friendships, though rare in general, are less prevalent among Muslim than non-Muslim youth. I also find that this lesser involvement in cross-gender friendships is limited to Muslim youth who adhere strongly to chastity norms, while parental norms and overall religiosity do not seem to influence these friendships. Among non-Muslim youth, chastity norms do not hamper cross-gender friendships, pointing to stronger links between chastity norms and gender segregation in Muslim than in non-Muslim communities. Finally, I assess the impact of cross-gender friendships on the gender role attitudes of Muslim and non-Muslim youth. Among boys, I find that cross-gender friendships are associated with more egalitarian gender role attitudes, a link that is particularly strong among Muslim boys. Hence, the limited cross-gender friendships among Muslim boys have implications for their cultural integration in terms of their gender role attitudes. In sum, the dissertation underscores that gender-related religious norms significantly influence the friendships of Muslim adolescents, not just their romantic relationships. Muslim girls engage less in interreligious friendships than Muslim boys, a pattern that can be partially attributed to Muslim girls' stronger endogamy norms. Furthermore, Muslim youth tend to have fewer cross-gender friendships than non-Muslim adolescents, a discrepancy that can be explained by their stronger chastity norms.
