Positive contact
1.How often has a foreigner helped you?
2.How often do you have interesting conversations
with a foreigner?
Now think about encounters with foreigners in
Germany. How often have you experienced the
following feelings:3. ...cheerful
4. ...satisfied
Scored from: 1 5never ,25sometimes ,35often,
45very often
Note: Reproduced with permission.
VALENCED CONTACT (SINGLE-ITEM SCALE)
Negative contact
On average, how frequently do you have
NEGATIVE/BAD contact with Black people?
Scored from: 1 5never to 75extremely frequentlyPositive contact
On average, how frequently do you have POSITIVE/
GOOD contact with Black people?
Scored from: 1 5never to 75extremely frequently
Note: Reproduced with permission.
MEDIATORS OF THE EFFECTS OF INTERGROUP CONTACT
ON OUTGROUP ATTITUDES
Intergroup Anxiety Scale (IAS)
(Stephan & Stephan, 1985 ).
Variable
Stephan and Stephan’s (1985) IAS measure is the most popular means by which intergroup anxiety has been
assessed. The scale is administered by asking participants to imagine how they would feel if they were the only
member of their ingroup interacting with people from (an)other social group(s). Bearing this scenario in mind,
participants are then asked to indicate the extent to which they would feel awkward ,self-conscious ,happy (reverse
scored), certain (reverse scored), accepted (reverse scored), confident (reverse scored), irritated ,impatient ,defensive ,
suspicious , and careful . Stephan and Stephan originally used 10-point rating scales but other studies have success-
fully used seven-point rating scales (e.g., Islam & Hewstone, 1993 ). Some studies have also adapted the original
rating scale format to a bipolar-adjective scale (e.g., Swart et al., 2011 ;Turner et al., 2008 ). Typically, higher scores
represent higher experienced intergroup anxiety.
While a number of the short versions based on Stephan and Stephan’s (1985) original scale exist /C0some using
a subset of three (e.g., Greenland & Brown, 1999 ), four (e.g., Harwood et al., 2005 , Study 2), or five (e.g., Voci &
Hewstone, 2003 , Study 1) items of the original 11 items /C0these shorter versions do not consistently use the same
items. Because of these discrepancies, we will report on a short-form of the anxiety scale that has been used in
two studies ( Paolini et al., 2004 , Study 1; Turner et al., 2008 , Study 1). Both these studies employed a 6-item ver-
sion of the original anxiety measure using the following adjectives in combination with the introduction blurb:
happy (reverse scored) , awkward, self-conscious, confident (reverse scored), relaxed (reverse scored), and defensive .
While it is by no means an ‘official’ version, this 6-item version does provide, as we shall argue, an attractive
shorter measure of intergroup anxiety for the researcher short on space in their questionnaire.
Lastly, we will also review a second short 6-item version ( Swart et al., 2010; Swart et al. 2011 )b a s e do n
Stephan and Stephan’s (1985) intergroup anxiety scale. This scale has been used on younger samples. This
version differs slightly from the other two versions covered here not only in terms of its use of simpler lan-
guage, making it better suited for younger samples, but also in its response format favoring a 5-point bipolar
adjective response format over the typical rating scale format. The adjective pairs used in this version include
relaxed/C0nervous, pleased /C0worried ,not scared /C0scared ,at ease/C0awkward ,open/C0defensive ,a n d confident /C0unconfident.666 23. MEASURES OF INTERGROUP CONTACT
VI. SOCIOCULTURAL INTERACTION AND CONFLICT