European societies and schools face the challenge of accommodating immigrant minorities from increasingly diverse cultural backgrounds. In view of significant belonging and achievement gaps between minority and majority groups in school, we examine which diversity approaches are communicated by actual school policies and which approaches predict smaller ethnic gaps in student outcomes over time. To derive diversity approaches, we content-analyzed diversity policies from ( n = 66) randomly sampled Belgian middle schools. Cluster analysis yielded different approaches valuing, ignoring, or rejecting cultural diversity in line with multiculturalism, colorblindness, and assimilationism, respectively. We estimated multilevel path models that longitudinally related diversity approaches to ( N = 1,747) minority and ( N = 1,384) majority students’ school belonging and achievement (self-reported grades) 1 year later. Multiculturalism predicted smaller belonging and achievement gaps over time; colorblindness and assimilationism were related to wider achievement and belonging gaps, respectively. Longitudinal effects of colorblindness on achievement were mediated by (less) prior school belonging.

In European Union (EU) countries, public debates about immigrants and citizenship are increasingly framed in cultural terms. Yet, there is no agreement within the citizenship literature on whether a cultural citizenship representation can be distinguished from the more established ethnic and civic representations and on how its measures relate to anti‐immigrant attitudes. The present study tested measures of citizenship representations among high school students (N = 1476) in six EU countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Sweden). Factor analyses favored a three‐factor model of citizenship representations (i.e., ethnic, cultural, and civic factors), which showed partial metric invariance. Across countries, ethnic and cultural scales correlated positively with each other and negatively with the civic scale. Moreover, ethnic and cultural scales related positively and the civic scale negatively to anti‐immigrant attitudes. However, when analyzed simultaneously, relations of the ethnic scale with anti‐immigrant attitudes were no longer significant, while those of the cultural and civic scales proved to be robust. Implications of these findings are discussed.

In light of the religious vitality of Muslim immigrants in historically Christian and highly secularized West-European societies, this study addresses three related questions: (a) How does childhood religious transmission affect adult religiosity among second-generation Muslims? (b) How do acculturating groups as proximal acculturation contexts affect effective transmission? and (c) How do second-generation acculturation orientations affect the transmission process? Using the cross-cultural TIES (“The Integration of the European Second Generation”) surveys among adult community samples of Turkish and Moroccan Belgian Muslims in two cities ( Ns = 500 and 481), cross-cultural Structural Equation Models were tested in the four groups to estimate the paths from childhood religious transmission to adult religiosity and acculturation orientations as latent dependent variables. As expected, (a) religious transmission was generally effective for religious identification, beliefs, and practices across groups, yet (b) transmission was most effective in the Turkish Belgian groups as acculturation contexts with high collective cultural continuity. And finally (c) across groups and religious dimensions, individual orientations toward heritage culture maintenance strengthened effective transmission, and host culture adoption played a minor role. We conclude that the religious life of the second generation is part of a continued orientation toward the heritage culture in acculturating families and communities.

No abstract