Conference Program

The increasing diversification of primary and lower secondary education in the Czech Republic provides an important context for examining peer responses to migration-related categories. The demographic composition of Czech primary schools has changed significantly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As of March 31 2025, there were 46,806 Ukrainian pupils enrolled in Czech elementary and secondary education, representing approximately 3.1 % of all students at these levels, with Ukrainians remaining the largest group of foreign-national pupils in the system. Ukrainian students account for the majority of foreign pupils, followed by Vietnamese and Slovak pupils, who together with Ukrainians and Russians comprise the vast majority of non-Czech nationalities in Czech schools (Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, 2025). These shifts have intensified everyday intergroup contact in classrooms and raised questions about how Czech children perceive and interact with peers from different national and ethnic groups in their educational environment.

Current state of knowledge suggests that even minimal social categorization can activate ingroup–outgroup distinctions (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Contemporary work on intergroup bias further demonstrates that prejudice in late childhood and early adolescence often manifests in subtle or latent forms rather than overt hostility (Brewer, 1999; Dovidio et al., 2010). In school contexts, such bias may be expressed through reduced willingness to cooperate, social distancing, or passive bystanding in exclusion situations rather than explicit rejection. Developmental research on ethnic and migration-related attitudes indicates that these patterns are already observable in middle childhood (Raabe & Beelmann, 2011).

Building on this theoretical framework, we employ a vignette-based experimental design (Atzmüller & Steiner, 2010; Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002) conducted in the Czech Republic. Students aged approximately 11–15 are randomly assigned to experimental conditions in which they read short, realistic school scenarios. The design manipulates two dimensions: A) the fictional classmate’s citizenship (Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Russian, or unspecified) and B) ethnicity (Roma vs. unspecified/majority appearance). This factorial structure allows us to examine whether both national belonging and ethnic cues independently shape the social and behavioral reactions of lower secondary school students toward their fictional classmates. The dependent variables capture declared social and behavioral reactions, measured using a Likert-type scale. These include indicators of prosocial intentions (e.g., willingness to cooperate, befriend, or support the classmate) and social distancing or exclusionary tendencies (e.g., avoidance or reluctance to interact).

The main research question asks whether students’ declared reactions differ depending on the fictional classmate’s citizenship and ethnicity. This comparative dimension allows us to explore whether broader socio-political and educational contexts moderate peer responses to newly arrived Ukrainian students and other immigrants. The study contributes to research on intergroup relations in adolescence by providing experimentally grounded evidence from real school populations across Czech lower secondary schools. The findings aim to inform discussions on school inclusion policies and early interventions addressing subtle forms of intergroup bias in increasingly diverse classrooms.