MULTI-UNIVERSITY INTERGROUP DIALOGUE RESEARCH PROJECT GUIDEBOOK 1 SECTION ONE INTRODUCTION The Multi-university Intergroup Dialogue Research Guidebook contains specific information about the implementation of a research project involving nine universities. They collaborated for four years to design, develop and implement a uniform curriculum and research design used at all institutions. The participating institutions were: Arizona State University Occidental College Syracuse University University of California, San Diego University of Maryland University of Massachusetts at Amherst University of Michigan, Ann Arbor University of Texas, Austin University of Washington, Seattle The goals of the guidebook are to: Articulate the rationale for evaluating intergroup dialogue; Describe what is an intergroup dialogue; Delineate the research questions and design; Situate this project within the theoretical and research literature on intergroup relations; Present the class assignments, interview protocols, instructions to coders, and the codes used to derive scales from the three qualitative aspects of the research – video taping, interviews, and students’ final papers; Provide the survey instruments and measures. 2 RATIONALE FOR EVALUATING INTERGROUP DIALOGUE The value of diversity is widely accepted in the United States.
However, the social science evidence on the educational benefits of racial and ethnic diversity that was presented to the Supreme Court in the University of Michigan’s affirmative action cases made clear that institutions need to make full use of diversity as an institutional resource if it is to have educational benefits Like other resources (such as, an excellent library or an outstanding faculty), racial/ethnic and other types of diversity are a resource that can be most effective by creating educational opportunities that students actually use. Leveraging diversity for educational benefit requires developing innovative courses and other academic initiatives that provide guided interaction and intellectual engagement between students of different backgrounds and life experiences. It is that interaction that helps diverse students learn from each other and gain the cultural competence they will need as citizens, leaders, and professionals in our increasingly diverse country and in its relationships with the wider world. The important question is what kind of academic initiatives will promote these outcomes.
Intergroup dialogue provides one innovative educational model that aims to guide students in learning how to talk with and listen to students from different backgrounds, discern commonalities as well as differences in these interactions, work cooperatively across differences, and normalize and learn how to negotiate intergroup conflicts. Some research has been conducted to assess the effects of intergroup dialogue (see, for example, Lopez, Gurin & Nagda, 1998; Nagda & Zuniga, 2003), although to our knowledge this multi-university project is the first to use random assignment to assess effects. Such a research design provides the assurance that effects found in this research are truly effects of participating in intergroup dialogues that cannot be attributed to selectivity (that is, not the result of just certain kinds of students choosing to be participants in intergroup dialogue). 3 WHAT IS AN INTERGROUP DIALOGUE? Intergroup Dialogues (IGD) bring together students from two or more social identity groups that sometimes have had contentious relationships with each other, or at the very least have lacked opportunities to talk in non-superficial ways.
Further, the focal social identities – in this project race and gender identities – represent historical and structural inequalities. Each of the social identity groups participating in the dialogues is represented equally. As an educational approach, three important aspects of intergroup dialogues are noteworthy: 1. Dialogue requires learning to listen, to ask questions of others, and to commit to understanding the perspectives of others, even if not agreeing.
Dialogue is difficult. Dialogue is not debate in which people try to convince each other so that one side “wins.” Dialogue is not discussion in which each person typically waits for another to stop talking in order to deliver his/her own monologue. It is not a term that simply substitutes for talk, for example when students say that they dialogue -- talk -- with their friends, roommates, and families about political and social issues. Students (and all of us) have to learn how to dialogue, a style of communication that facilitates understanding rather than debate! 2.
In the multi-university project intergroup dialogues are guided by a curriculum that includes learning objectives, didactic and experiential activities, historical and social science materials, writing assignments, and questions to stimulate dialogue and reflection (Zúñiga, Nagda, Chesler, & Cytron-Walker, 2007). Intergroup dialogue courses are facilitated by faculty, professional staff, graduate students or undergraduates who undergo intensive training. Two facilitators, one with membership in each of the identity groups, work as a team. The overall goals of intergroup dialogue are: To develop a language and capacity for dialogue -- deep listening, suspending; judgments, identifying assumptions, reflecting, and inquiring—in a diverse society; To reflect upon and learn about self and others as members of a social group(s) in the context of systems of privilege and inequality; To explore the similarities and differences in experiences within and across social group memberships; To gain knowledge and understand the impact of sex and gender on gender relations in the United States; To develop skills to work with differences, disagreements, and conflicts as opportunities for deeper understanding; To identify and plan individual and collective actions that contribute toward more inclusive and just communities.
4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND DESIGN Two broad research questions were investigated: 1) Does participation in a race and a gender intergroup dialogue have educational effects not attributable to a predisposition to participate in diversity programs (e., selectivity)? 2) What processes inherent in the combined content and experience of the dialogues account for demonstrated effects? To answer the first question, an experimental design was employed, with students randomly assigned to an experimental group (to participate in intergroup dialogue) and a wait-list control group (non-participants). To partly answer the second question, a comparison group was created of students in social science classes that focused on racial and gender inequality. The research design is described more fully below. Random Assignment At all of the participating institutions students applied on-line to enroll in intergroup dialogue courses.
That made it possible to randomly assign applicants – equated for motivation to participate in intergroup dialogue – either to a dialogue (the experimental group) or to a control group. (See Section Two for instructions used to create random assignment.) Number and Composition of Dialogues and Control Groups A total of 26 race dialogues with 26 control groups, and 26 gender dialogues with 26 control groups were conducted across the institutions over three years. In each of these experiments, the race and gender of the students were controlled. The goal was to enroll four each of white men, white women, men of color, and women of color.
The actual numbers varied somewhat with a range of 12 – 16 students in each dialogue and each control group. Why were students of color not disaggregated to assess effects for different ethnic/racial groups? There were simply not enough students applying to participate in intergroup dialogues from each of the separate ethnic/racial groups at each institution to have multiple dialogues and control groups comparing white students with each of the other ethnic/racial groups. Comparison Groups The project also measured students enrolled in social science classes on race and gender in order to test if effects of dialogue could be attributed to the method of dialogue over and beyond learning content about race and gender. These social science classes used lecture/discussion format.
The project conducted 14 race and 14 gender social science comparisons. Each of the comparison groups included 4 white men, 4 white women, 4 men of color and 4 women of color drawn randomly from the students in these classes who volunteered to be part of the study. This design feature provides evidence – testing if change over time turned out to be greater for students in the dialogue courses than students in the social science classes – for the importance of the dialogue method. All students in the dialogues, control groups, and comparison groups were administered a survey before classes started for the term, a post-survey at the end of the term, and a one-year longitudinal follow-up survey.
(See the Appendix for the actual surveys.) These surveys provide the primary measures for assessing the effects of dialogues (comparing the dialogue students with both control group students and the comparison group students). All students in the dialogues responded to the same final paper assignment at all institutions. These papers were coded for 25 dimensions of how students evaluated their dialogue experience. The coded papers were entered into a qualitative analysis computer program, NVIVO, which provides an important mechanism for tying student experiences involving dialogue processes with effects of the dialogues, as measured by the surveys.
(See Section Three for the paper assignment, instructions to coders, and codes applied to these qualitative materials.) The Special Qualitative Assessments in Ten Race and Ten Gender Dialogues. A sub-study, using video tapes and interviewing, closely examined the interactions and experiences of students in 10 race dialogues and 10 gender dialogues. Three sessions of each of these dialogues were videotaped (one early, one mid, and one late in the term). The tapes were edited and coded for eight dimensions of student interactions with each other.
(See Section Four for Instructions for videographers and for coders, along with the codes for deriving scales from the edited videos. All students in the videotaped sessions were also interviewed at the end of the term. Scales for empathy, emotion, engagement in the dialogue, self-assessed skills, and commitments to action were developed for the transcribed interviews. (See Section Five for the interview protocol, instructions for the coders, and codes that were applied to the interviews.) Analyses In order to develop scales and summary indices, the quantitative measures from the survey instruments (all survey items on the pretest and posttest) were factor analyzed.
Those measures are presented in Section Two. Preliminary tests of treatment effects (effects of the dialogue across time relative to the waitlist control group) have been conducted using a repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with time (pre-post) as a within subjects variable and condition (dialogue vs. waitlist control) as a between subjects variable. Evidence of effect is demonstrated when there are no statistical differences between dialogue and control at pretest and when the statistical interaction term between time (pretest vs.
posttest) and condition (dialogue vs. control) is significant, indicating greater change over time in the predicted direction for dialogue students than control students. Similar tests have also been conducted to understand the relative effect of dialogue groups to social science comparison courses. Because the data are nested (measures within persons, persons within dialogue groups, dialogue groups within institutions), Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) was used to confirm or disconfirm effects that were demonstrated in the ANOVA analyses.
Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analytic techniques were utilized to investigate the communication and psychological processes that produce the three sets of outcomes. 6 INTERGROUP DIALOGUE: ITS GROUNDING IN THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF INTERGROUP RELATIONS College campuses in the United States abound with various diversity/multicultural initiatives inside and outside the classroom, most of which are guided either explicitly or implicitly by the classic work by Gordon Allport on intergroup contact (Allport, 1954). Allport argued that cross- racial contact will produce more tolerant attitudes when members of different groups interact with each other under specified conditions, namely when they have equal status in the situation, get to know each other well, and cooperate with each other toward common goals, and when their contact is supported by relevant authorities. Allport’s theorizing has guided research and interventions involving contact between many groups, not merely racial/ethnic groups.
Most research on the impact of intergroup contact supports its efficacy in reducing prejudice and intergroup bias (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Despite their common heritage in the work on intergroup contact, educational initiatives found on US college campuses often reflect different theoretical orientations built upon the general Allport model of intergroup contact.
