Experiments in Diverse Democracy

A Multi-University Research Evaluation of the Educational Benefits of Intergroup Dialogues

ABSTRACT
Major Questions. The Supreme Court ruled in Grutter. V. Bollinger that educational benefits of racial/ethnic diversity provide a compelling governmental interest that justifies the use of race as one of many factors in student admission to higher education institutions. The most important question is what kind of academic initiatives that utilize diversity as a potential educational resource promote the educational outcomes that the Court deemed important? This project evaluates one such relatively new academic initiative, intergroup dialogues, and asks several major questions, the most critical of which are: 1) Does participation in a race or a gender intergroup dialogue have educational effects that cannot be attributed to selectivity, and 2) What processes that take place within dialogues account for demonstrated effects?

Rationale. The limited research on intergroup dialogues has been largely based on case studies in single institutions, focused nearly exclusively on cognitive outcomes, and mostly inattentive to processes that produce effects. In contrast, this project assesses effects in nine institutions (addressing the important issue of external validity), emphasizes a wide range of outcomes, and explores the impact of processes within the dialogues. Intergroup dialogues offer a new theoretical approach to intergroup relations. Their goal is intergroup understanding and collaboration based on dialoguing about issues that sometimes divide social groups. The distinctiveness of the separate groups is deliberately maintained while students learn to recognize both intergroup differences and commonalities, and to negotiate intergroup conflicts.

Hypotheses and Questions. Five major hypotheses guide the research, all of which concern predicted effects of intergroup dialogues in comparison to wait-list controls and other comparison groups, as well as predicted differential effects on cognitive and affective/action outcomes of course content and active learning processes.

Research Methods. Effects will be tested comparing: 1) students randomly assigned from applicants of intergroup dialogues either to a dialogue or to a wait-list, and 2) dialogue participants with students enrolled in small social science classes on race and on gender, living-learning programs, and community-service projects. Pre- and post-measures will be taken of participant and wait-list/comparison students. A one-year follow-up will be conducted to assess longer-term effects of intergroup dialogues. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of measurement and observation will be utilized.

Data Analysis. In addition to descriptive statistics, the project will use the inferential analysis framework of hierarchical linear modeling, which can handle the clustering that occurs due to university as well as the longitudinal aspects of the design.

Collaboration
This is a genuine multi-university collaboration that has grown out of prolonged and deep discussion across the nine institutions. These discussions have produced agreements on the standardized educational intervention, research design, measures of effects and processes, and the on-going multi-university oversight of the project.