ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the causality in the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust in two different contexts, namely German neighborhoods and public primary schools. Since most of the empirical studies on ethnic diversity and trust have cross-sectional designs, they only occasionally provide evidence on the causality of the observed relationship. In line with the expectations, the regression models confirm the statistical significance of the negative association between ethnic diversity for neighborhoods and schools. Moreover, they show that the negative relationship holds for natives and immigrants. In the neighborhood study, however, ethnic diversity and the unemployment level are considered simultaneously. Whereas the salience of ethnic diversity affects native rather than immigrant residents' trust in their neighbors, the opposite holds true for parents. Parents in ethnically diverse schools judge parental cooperation more negatively when the salience of schools' ethnic diversity was raised by experimental stimuli, whereas no such effect was observed for parents in homogeneous schools.
