Browsing by Author "Saarnio, Tomi"

Immigration has become an important topic of discussion in recent years. The thesis presents salient Finnish researchers work on social attitudes towards immigrants and on racism. The thesis focuses particularly to the explanatory models that researchers use to explain Finnish attitudes toward immigration. The thesis proposes that previous Finnish academic studies have overlooked evolutionary psychological perspective as a potential model to explain attitudes towards immigration. The thesis forms and tests a hypothesis that is based on evolutionary psychology. This hypothesis offers a different way of thinking about how people's attitudes are formed and at the same time tries to challenge established notions about attitudes towards immigration and immigrants. The core research material that the thesis uses is Finnish Attitudes to Immigration: Suomen Kuvalehti Survey 2015, which is provided by the Finnish Social Science Data Archive. The survey measured Finnish attitudes towards racism and asked people's attitudes towards the immigration of select nationalities to Finland. The survey uses census based sampling so that the survey represents entire Finnish adult population by age, sex and place of residence. Methods used by the study are multivariate methods, namely factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Finnish attitudes towards immigration form a clear ethnic hierarchy. Majority of Finns, for example, oppose the immigration of Somalis (64%), Iraqis (60%) or Afghans (58%) to Finland. Conversely, Finns are in favor of immigration, for example, the Swedes (86%), Germans (86%) or Estonians (73%) to Finland. Finns on average did not support racist statements. Questionnaires' racist statements were used to form a factor measuring respondents' empathy. Factor structure served as the basis for the causal structural equation model, which looked at the link between empathy and attitudes towards immigration. The results show that there is a link between empathy and respondents' attitudes toward immigration, particularly to immigration originating outside the EU. The higher the respondents' score was on the empathy factor, the more positive attitudes the respondent showed toward immigration from outside the EU. Similarly, high empathy scores also predicted that the respondent did not exceedingly support immigration from other Western countries. Group differences were measured by dividing the respondents into two groups. In the first group were respondents who lived in households with children under 18 years of age (N = 229). In the second group were all other respondents (N = 681). Looking at the group differences it was observed that respondents' scores on the empathy factor did not predict attitudes toward immigration in the same way. Respondents' that lived with children reported more positive views towards immigration from other Western countries when compared with the other group (p-value less than 0.10). The empathy factor explained, on average, 12 % of the variation of the two factors describing attitudes towards immigration (r2 = 0.12). The results give support to the hypothesis proposed on the one hand, but on the other hand cannot confirm it because either the differences between groups were not statistically significant enough or that the effect on the attitudes was so small that it was not interesting.