Exploring Adolescents’ Perceptions of Cultural Groups: Contents, Structures, and Dynamics of Social Representations of Finnish, Middle Eastern, and Ukrainian People

Global migration has increased ethnic and cultural diversification at the local community level, creating novel, culturally diverse everyday contexts and reshaping understandings of groups with different cultural backgrounds. This study investigates the perceptions that young people from various cultural backgrounds have of each other. We employed a structural approach to social representations utilizing the word associations method. Participants included 42 adolescents ages 13 to 19 from the Savo region in Finland of Finnish, Middle Eastern, or Ukrainian backgrounds. The data consisted of 577 word associations related to these three cultural groups. Qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics were used to examine the contents, evaluations, structures, and potential dynamics of social representations of these groups. Five structural elements were identified—cultural stereotypes, appearance of people, characteristics of people, characteristics of culture, and social connections—which were divided into four structural zones of social representations. While the structures of “Finnish” and “Ukrainian” indicated potential transformation in social representations, the structure of “Middle Eastern” showed stability. Ingroup favoritism was found in all three participant groups based on the evaluations of associations. The findings are discussed in relation to the sociopolitical context of Finnish society.