The (un)importance of ethnicity in adolescents’ boundary making: An analysis over a two-school year period in a super-diverse city

Abstract

Drawing on three rounds of in-depth interviews with Antwerp pupils aged 11–14, we examine how adolescents’ moral boundary making shifts (or not) during the course of a two-school year period, as they talk about whom they like to hang out with (or not), the diversity in their surroundings and in their friendship groups, and the (un)importance of ethnicity in their peer relations. The results show that adolescents initially draw three subtypes of moral boundaries (based on being “good-rebellious”, “stingy-generous” or “decent-indecent”) to emphasize so-called differences between the majority and minority groups; these boundaries, however, reportedly do not structure their friendship groups and even become disconnected from ethnicity in the latter research rounds. Moral boundaries that are set not to distinguish between ethnic majority and minority groups, but against the children of recently arrived immigrants (“established-outsider” boundaries), however, are salient in all three research rounds and are reportedly not crossed in our respondents’ friendship group formation.