Assessing outgroup prejudice among 13–15-year-old students attending Catholic and Protestant secondary schools in Northern Ireland: An empirical enquiry

Abstract

Northern Ireland has been and remains a religiously divided community. This study sets out to examine outgroup prejudice among a sample of 1799 13–15-year-old students attending Catholic or Protestant schools and employs both bivariate analyses and hierarchical modelling to chart the associations between outgroup prejudice and personal factors (sex and age), psychological factors (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism), and religious factors (affiliation, church attendance, and personal prayer). After taking personal, psychological, and religious factors into account, little variance in levels of outgroup prejudice between students could be attributed to the type of school they attended.