Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice, Campus Studies Find - NYTimes.com: One new study, of Princeton students, used daily questionnaires to monitor roommate interactions and perceptions.
“In the earliest weeks of the relationship, the positive emotions declined for minority students with white roommates,” said Mr. Trail, an author of the study. “It wasn’t that the white students started being mean or negative. Instead, it was a drop-off in positive behaviors, like smiling or making eye contact, that led the minority students to feel worse.”
A study of students at Duke University, using lists of their close friends before college and at the end of freshman year, found that white students, the least likely to have had close friends of a different race, were the most likely to develop more diverse friendships as freshmen — while black students, who came in with more interracial friendships, had a decline in cross-race friendship freshman year. The study found little change freshman year in the diversity of Asian and Hispanic students’ friendships.
Freshmen with roommates of a different race — or those who lived alone in a dorm — were the most likely to diversify their friendships.
