Entre la marginacion y la integracion. Un estudio sobre el prejucio etnico, orientacion politica y empleo del lenguaje

The aim of the present research was to study the relationships between racial prejudice and political ideology of the respondents on one hand, and, on the other hand, to explore the relationships between the two variables and the way our respondents described the minority ethnic groups considered. The theoretical background referred both to cognitive-motivational perspective on modern racism and to the social representations theory (Moscovici, 1984). A questionnaire was created, containing both traditional measures of racial prejudice (Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995) and political orientation, and a free association task, in order to point out the words people used to describe immigrants. 305 university students (44% males; 56% women; age average: 23) from an Italian north-west town were interviewed. Quantitative data were submitted to variance analysis, while the lexicon production was analysed with Spad-T software. Findings concerning racial attitudes and ideology were coherent with the literature, as expected; the analysis of textual corpus highlined the relations between both variables and the social representations our subjects offered of the various groups.