Countering Islamophobia in the Victorian Population

Islamophobia underpins extremist verbal and physical attacks on Muslim communities. It has become widespread in Australian society, and normalised in everyday settings such as in mainstream media. There is general agreement among Australian researchers and community representatives that the concept of Islamophobia is a useful tool for understanding and developing ways to challenge anti-Islam attitudes. However, despite it becoming widespread, Islamophobia should not be treated as a singular problem as it takes many different forms (see Peucker and Smith 2019), which require targeted responses. This brief provides contemporary empirical insights into the extent of Islamophobia in Victoria, and how it is manifest, in order to help develop policy responses. In November 2019, we undertook an online representative survey of 4019 Victorians to examine Islamophobia in Australia. We asked questions about respondents’ attitudes towards cultural diversity, racial equality and privilege; trust and fairness; Muslims and Islam; and other ethno-cultural groups in Australian society; their experiences of racism and discrimination; their contact with Muslims and knowledge of Islam; their trust of institutions; political affiliation; and support for extreme politics (e.g., violence, non-democratic governance). To our knowledge, this was the largest representative survey undertaken in Victoria with the purpose of measuring Victorians’ perceptions of and attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. Based on respondents’ answers, we used latent class analysis to reveal groups in the Victorian population. Latent class analysis is an advanced statistical method that identifies related sets of responses in a dataset that may be hidden even from trained observers (Hagenaars and McCutcheon 2002; Uebersax 1993; Heinen 1996)

Understanding Varied Attitudes Towards Muslims

The focus of this research was to determine the prevalence and type of Islamophobia in the Victorian population. Islamophobia sentiment feeds the actions of right-wing extremist attacks on Muslim communities. But it has also become widespread in Australian society, and normalised in everyday settings, such as our mainstream media. Islamophobia cannot be treated with a singular approach or mode of intervention. Our study comes at a critical time; it provides empirical evidence on the extent of the problem, as well as documenting the varied manifestations of Islamophobic sentiment, with the view to developing potential action points and policy. In November 2019 we undertook a survey of 4019 Victorians. We asked questions on their attitudes towards cultural diversity, racial equality and privilege; trust and fairness; Muslims and Islam; and other ethno-cultural groups in Australian society; their experiences of racism and discrimination; their contact with Muslims and knowledge of Islam; and their political affiliation. To our knowledge, this was the largest survey undertaken in Victoria with the purpose of solely measuring Victorians perceptions of Muslims and Islam. Based on respondents’ answers, we used latent class analysis to segment the Victorian population. Five groups were generated: Islamophobic, Islamophobic with assimilationist tendencies, Undecided, Progressive with concerns about Islam, and Progressive. We then distilled the demographic and attitudinal attributes of these groups, with the view to identifying roles and drivers to help guide policy and intervention. We tested this five group segmentation with community organisations in Victoria working in the broad areas of diversity and multiculturalism, and with a particular emphasis on Muslim and non-Muslim relations. The groupings made sense on-the-ground, and they provided a strong pathway forward for program and policy design

Racism in Australia : a protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: Racism has been identified as a major source of injustice and a health burden in Australia and across the world. Despite the surge in Australian quantitative research on the topic, and the increasing recognition of the prevalence and impact of racism in Australian society, the collective evidence base has yet to be comprehensively reviewed or meta-analysed. This protocol describes the first systematic review and meta-analysis of racism in Australia at the national level, focussing on quantitative studies. The current study will considerably improve our understanding of racism, including its manifestations and fluctuation over time, variation across settings and between groups, and associations with health and socio-economic outcomes. Methods: The research will consist of a systematic literature review and meta-analysis. Searches for relevant studies will focus on the social and health science databases CINAHL, PsycINFO, PubMed and Scopus. Two reviewers will independently screen eligible papers for inclusion and extract data from included studies. Studies will be included in the review and meta-analysis where they meet the following criteria: (1) report quantitative empirical research on self-reported racism in Australia, (2) report data on the prevalence of racism, or its association with health (e.g. mental health, physical health, health behaviours) or socio-economic outcomes (e.g. education, employment, income), and (3) report Australian data. Measures of racism will focus on study participants’ self-reports, with a separate analysis dedicated to researcher-reported measures, such as segregation and differential outcomes across racial/ethnic groups. Measures of health and socio-economic outcomes will include both self-reports and researcher-reported measures, such as physiological measurements. Existing reviews will be manually searched for additional studies. Study characteristics will be summarised, and a meta-analysis of the prevalence of racism and its associations will be conducted using random effects models and mean weighted effect sizes. Moderation and subgroup analyses will be conducted as well. All analyses will use the software CMA 3.0. Discussion: This study will provide a novel and comprehensive synthesis of the quantitative evidence base on racism in Australia. It will answer questions about the fluctuation of racism over time, its variation across settings and groups, and its relationship with health and socio-economic outcomes. Findings will be discussed in relation to broader debates in this growing field of research and will be widely disseminated to inform anti-racism research, action and policy nationally. Systematic review registration: PROSPERO CRD42021265115

DIE AREALE DER IKAVISCHEN, EKAVISCHEN UND IJEKAVISCHEN MUNDARTEN IM SLAVONISCHEN DIALEKT

Der Author hat in diesem Artikel die Areale aller Mundarten des slavonisehen Dialekts in Detail dargestellt und auch eine Karte hinzugefügt wo man die Grenzen der besprechenden Mundarten sehen kann

Twenty years after genocide : the role of psychology in the reconciliation and reconstruction process in Rwanda

This Special Thematic Section brings together eight papers that showcase different aspects of the contribution of psychology to the processes of recovery in Rwanda following the 1994 genocide. The Section is noteworthy in part because a majority of the papers have Rwandan authors. In summarizing the contributions I make six observations about the remarkable context of the genocide and its aftermath: a) it was distinctive from previous mass violence in its intensity and character; b) it has been characterized by bystander inaction and the problems of positioning outsiders to help; c) hundreds of thousands of accused or convicted perpetrators have lived alongside survivors; d) electronic media played a profound role not only in promoting violence but also in building peace; e) Rwanda has been the site of unprecedented societal interventions with political goals that have the character and content of social psychological experiments; and f) the role of memorialization in repairing or sustaining harm needs further examination. I conclude by noting that the study of recovery is clear proof that the genocide in Rwanda, as is the case with genocides of the past, failed to achieve its aims

Stereotyping and prejudice : revisiting Hamilton and Gifford's illusory correlation studies

Social psychology in the 1970s developed a powerful new cognitive paradigm. Studies of social influence, attitude change and group dynamics had dominated the field for the preceding 20 years (as illustrated by the studies discussed in Chapters 3 to 9). Even though social psychology had always studied mental life, and had avoided the behaviourist domination of experimental psychology that had seen the near banishment of the study of mental phenomena from the psychological laboratory, in the late 1960s and early 1970s a new approach that became known as cognitive psychology was starting to dominate psychology. Many cognitive psychologists were armed with the metaphor of the person as a faulty information processing device and this idea was imported into social psychology in the 1970s. This metaphor implied that as people processed information about the world around them, they made a series of errors (in particular, because they had limited processing capacity) and these had a range of unintended and unfortunate consequences

Expanding on psychological theories of engagement to understand activism in context(s)

Recent years have seen an increase in theoretical and empirical interest in the dynamics of social change. Missing from much of this literature, which has focused broadly on collective action, is attention to the people who seek to bring about social change, activists. Mass collective action is unlikely to occur without the involvement of people to recruit, mobilize, and organize social change campaigns. Including recent research from Australia, Europe, and North and South America, and studies of global online activists, this issue highlights multi-method approaches to studying activists and activism across a variety of different regional, issue-based, and socio-political contexts. In addition to contributing to ongoing theoretical and empirical discussions, the issue addresses the policy and strategic implications of this research for social change agents and organizations

Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology

Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology introduces the principal research methods and statistical procedures that underpin psychological research. With a broad range of support materials and features it is the ideal textbook to accompany both a first and second year course

The power of political Deja Vu : when collective action becomes an effort to change the future by preventing the return of the past

This article examines the conditions under which political déjà vu (PDV), a perceived analogy between past and present societal-level traumatic events, can mobilize people to support system-changing collective action. We propose that individuals' perceptions of PDV can evolve both social identification with a group that sustains the victimized and disidentification with the perceived perpetrators. We further suggest that disidentification and identification can form two distinct psychological paths to collective action through the sequential effects of moral outrage and collective efficacy beliefs. We tested these ideas in a cross-sectional field study (N = 272) in the context of antigovernment protests over a missing activist in Argentina, a country with a legacy of enforced disappearances. The findings demonstrated that perceiving two events from different times as similar simultaneously predicted identifying as a supporter of the victimized and disidentifying with the perceived wrongdoer. Disidentification was found to predict collective action intentions through the sequential effect of collective efficacy beliefs and moral outrage, whereas the indirect effect of social identification was nonsignificant. Results provide an intriguing example of the effects of perceived PDV in social mobilization and extend our understanding of disidentification as a powerful predictor of collective action

Overcoming the social barriers to climate consensus

It can be tempting to think that people who disagree with you are mad, bad or simply stupid. However, not only are such judgements usually wrong, but telling people that they are stupid is unlikely to convince them of the merit of your own view. Yet this is often what happens when it comes to debates about climate change and what we ought to do about it. Despite there being a near consensus in the scientific community that the primary driver of climate change is anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, and that we need to cut those emissions if we’re to keep global warming to a minimum, the public remains divided on the issue