membership salience. The recognition that group membership salience is a central moderating variable that helps
us understand when contact will be more or less effective stems from a series of experimental and correlational
studies, the latter of which we will focus on in greater detail below (see also Schmid & Hewstone, 2010 ). The
question as to how contact should best be structured in ways that allow for changes in the cognitive representa-
tions of self and others to facilitate attitude change has long been disputed. Some authors argue that for inter-
group contact to be successful, social categorizations (i.e., group affiliations) need to be deemphasized
(‘decategorization’; Brewer & Miller, 1984 ) while others have argued that they should be replaced with more
inclusive group boundaries (‘recategorization’; Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993 ). While evi-
dence for both of these approaches exists, a key problem surrounds these two models: the lowering of group
membership salience (i.e., de-emphasis of social category based information) may prevent generalization effects
from the encountered outgroup individual to other outgroup members that have not as yet been encountered.
Brown and Hewstone (2005) thus argued that contact should be of an ‘intergroup’ nature, such that group
membership salience during contact should be retained to ensure generalization from the encountered outgroup
individual to the wider outgroup. They reasoned that keeping group membership low during contact (as advo-
cated in the decategorization and recategorization approaches) is inadvisable since individuals are unlikely to
notice group affiliation and may not process stereotype-disconfirming information, which may then impede posi-
tive attitude generalization to the outgroup as a whole. Both experimental (e.g., Van Oudenhoven, Groenewoud,
& Hewstone, 1996 ) and correlational evidence now offers consistent support that the relationship between contact
and outgroup attitudes is stronger when group membership salience is high (see Brown & Hewstone, 2005 ).
Many studies now show that salience moderates the contact-attitude link for a wide range of attitude measures
(including outgroup trust, forgiveness, perceived outgroup homogeneity, and the desire to live in the majority
group country; Harwood et al., 2005 ).
Below we provide an overview of two measures used to capture group membership salience during contact. It
should be noted that we include here only measures that were used in studies that explicitly examined salience
as a moderator of contact’s effects on an outcome measure.
Group Membership Salience during Contact: Measure 1
(Voci & Hewstone, 2003 ).
Variable
Voci and Hewstone (2003) used different operationalizations of group salience in two cross-sectional studies in
the context of intergroup relations between Italians and immigrants. For the purpose of this toolkit, we will focus
on the three items used in Study 1 (it is more advisable, from a latent variable modelling perspective, to use these
three reliable items than the two items used in Study 2).
Description
Voci and Hewstone (2003) used three items to measure salience (see below for sample details). Responses
were recorded on a 5-point Likert-type rating scale. Higher scores represented more perceived group salience
during the interaction. When considering the moderation by salience, Voci and Hewstone’s (2003) results
revealed significant effects, and in the expected direction, between contact and intergroup anxiety (a negative
effect), and attitudes towards co-workers (a positive effect). Contact was more strongly associated with less inter-
group anxiety when salience was high than when salience was low; similarly, contact was more strongly associ-
ated with positive attitudes when salience was high than low.
Sample
Study 1 examined the association of intergroup contact (quantity and quality) with immigrants on intergroup
anxiety, perceived variability, outgroup attitudes, and subtle prejudice among N5310 Italian students
(Mage522.20 years, SD52.39). Voci and Hewstone (2003) reported a mean group salience statistic of M52.17.
Reliability
Internal Consistency
The three items exhibited a Cronbach alpha of .63 ( Voci & Hewstone, 2003 ).671 MODERATORS OF THE INTERGROUP CONTACT TO OUTGROUP ATTITUDES RELATIONSHIP
VI. SOCIOCULTURAL INTERACTION AND CONFLICT