Dynamics of Intergroup Relations among Indonesian Youth

Abstract

The richness of social, cultural and religious diversity of Indonesia is a unique and relevant context for stimulating intergroup relationships. In such context, maintaining social harmony is a challenge because group identity is easily salient. This study aims to picture intergroup relationships among Indonesian youth, who will take main roles on the future of this country. They are also potential change agents for communities. Specifically, this study explores and identifies salient social, cultural and religion group categorization among college students in Indonesia. Furthermore, this study examines the level of outgroup trust and the level of accommodative communication practicing in interaction with members of outgroup. This study also pays a particular attention on exploring the role models for Indonesian youth in communication. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are implemented using questionnaires and focus group discussions. 1197 college students from five universities in four big cities in Indonesia are participated. The findings show that the group categories salient are religion, ethnicity, and clan/family memberships. This indicates that strong group identity is highly likely to be built mainly based on those categorizations, which would be used as a basis to make distinction who belongs to the ingroup and the outgroup. The findings also identify the low of outgroup trust among the participants, particularly on benevolence dimension. The findings are in line with the assumption that less positive evaluation, specifically on affective basis tend to be given to people from different group identity. Furthermore, participants also tend to avoid interaction with outgroups, and to express such a non-accommodative communication in interaction with members of outgroups. Almost thirty percent of the participants does not have role models in communication may take role on the results. They do not have sufficient references to communicating accommodatively with members of outgroups. While a few participants have an attitude of openness to differences, most of them appear reluctant to have intensive interaction with members of outgroups due to negative anticipation and feeling uncomfortable in dealing with outgroups. The implication from this study is that the context of diversity in Indonesia needs to be managed, particularly for the young generation, so the negative impact of low of outgroup trust and less positive communication with members of outgroups could be minimized.