Differences in Social Participation: Blacks and Whites

Three prominent explanations of ethnic differences in social participa-tion—the isolation, compensation, and ethnic community theories—are critically examined and found wanting on several grounds. As an alternative, a social-psychological approach emphasizing self-efficacy and system-blaming is pro-posed. A test of the explanation shows that, with some modification, it is an adequate representation of the participation patterns noted among blacks and whites. The findings indicate greater differences within races than between them, a pattern predicted by the proposed theory. Prior explanations, it is concluded, have not adequately accounted for the complexity of social partici-pation; hence much of the debate about their relative viability has been misplaced. Differences in the extent of social participation have long attracted the attention of social scientists. Much of the research centered on the differen-tial involvement of blacks and whites (cf. London; Myrdal et al.; Olsen; Orum; Wright and Hyman) and, more recently, their comparison with Mexican Americans (Antunes and Gaitz; Williams et al.). Three explana-tions have been commonly offered stressing compensation, isolation, and ethnic communal identity. l Central as these interpretations are to an evalua-tion of potential intergroup conflict and societal integration, they have been rendered only as ex post facto explanations of sample-specific findings. They have not been fully explicated or directly tested. To further confound matters, the explanations have either been viewed as antithetical (Babchuk and Thompson; Orum), suggesting they are not equally viable, or as complementary in that they have been seen as relevant to different situations.