Disentangling the Role of Migration Background and SES in Student-Expected Interpersonal Teacher Behavior

Abstract

We investigated student-expected differences in teachers' interpersonal behavior toward fictitious classmates with different migration and socioeconomic backgrounds, with teacher beliefs as potential moderators. Sixty-eight teachers (M_age = 41.55, 70.6% female), and 1186 students in Grades 4–6 (M_age = 10.17, 47.8% girls) participated. A conjoint experiment systematically investigated the relative effects of classmates' migration background and socioeconomic characteristics (parental income, education, and the child's favorite hobby) on students' expectations of teachers' nice and angry behavior toward those classmates. Bayesian posterior distributions of Marginal Means were calculated for each child characteristic. Students expected teachers to behave more positively toward children with poor (vs. rich) parents, high-educated (vs. low-educated) parents, and with reading (vs. playing games) as favorite hobby. A child's migration background and teachers' beliefs about multiculturalism and meritocracy were not linked to student-expected interpersonal behaviors. According to students, teachers mainly differentiate in their interpersonal behavior based on the socioeconomic characteristics of children.