Perception of Ethnic Identity in Northern Ireland

Hughes (2011) discovered that Northern Irish (NI) Catholic and Protestant adolescents’ biased perceptions toward the out-group promoted ethnic stereotyping and beliefs that varying cultural values were a threat to their own. The current study examined if NI university students would perceive an individual born in one ethnicity but adopted and raised by a family of the other ethnicity as being different from or the same as the ethnicity as which he/she was raised. Participants were 146 Catholic and Protestant undergraduates from Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland and were recruited from announcements made in lecture halls and classrooms. Participants read either the adopted or non-adopted version of a story about a fictional male Catholic or Protestant character and selected which group they believed he belonged. Results indicated that birth ethnicity of the character was related to participant’s perception of his current ethnicity, Ï?2 (1, N=146) = 9.13, p = .003. Twenty-one percent of participants perceived the character adopted by an other-ethnicity family as being different from that family’s ethnicity, while only 4% perceived the non-adopted character’ ethnicity as being different from his family’s ethnicity. Although not significant but marginally indicative, Catholic participants were more likely to perceive the adopted, raised-as-Catholic character as being different from Catholic whereas Protestants were more likely to perceive the adopted, raised-as-Protestant character as being different from Protestant. Overall, results suggest that participants were more likely to perceive the adopted character as being different from the ethnicity as which he was raised