NSF Award
1551782
August 11, 2015 is the 50th Anniversary commemoration of the Watts Riots. The commemoration will include a series of media, educational and community-based programs that highlight issues relating to social justice, community policing, and group relations. With the heightened sense of group identity through the community focus on the Watts commemoration as well as other incidents, one can survey the population of Los Angeles to examine attitudes to race, ethnicity, and in-group vs. out-group. The questions along with survey experiments will provide us with a better understanding of the lasting impact of the riots as well as impact of other incidents that have occurred throughout the past year. The finidngs can be used to develop policy and programming recommendations for the L.A. Human Relations Commission, community partners, city council, and the major's office. They findings could also be relevant for other communities with heightened intergroup tensions. This includes areas where community and law enforcement controversies have raged, such as Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charleston.<br/><br/>This projects holds promise for political scientists and social psychologists interested in questions related to particularistic and superordinate identities. First, the Los Angeles focus regarding the Watts anniversiary allows for understanding of whether and how random exposure to particularistic and/or superordinate identity cues against a "real world" backdrop of increased public consideration of intergroup boundaries produces results different from what scholars have disccovered in using identity primes in the lab or survey-based studies outside of areas such as this one. Second, the survey instrument enables this project to examine the effects of identity priming on a wider array of outcome meaures than imployed in political science to date. Instead of focusing just on future political behavior such as voting, demonstrating, etc. the focus is broaden to focus on neighborhood, social network, policing, mental health-related issues, etc. This broader focus enables broader insights into identity-based effects.
