GraceKao, KaraJoyner, and Kelly StamperBalistreri, The Company We Keep: Interracial Friendships and Romantic Relationships from Adolescence to Adulthood, Russell Sage Foundation, 2019. 208 p. $29.95 (paper)

Abstract

One of the best measures of integration is the level of intermarriage. Among American newlyweds in 2015, 11 percent of Whites, 18 percent of Blacks, and 29 percent of Asians married someone from a different race (p. 96). Almost as good a measure of integration is the frequency of interracial friendship and dating relationships. What Kao, Joyner, and Balistreri have done is to use a unique data source, The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), to examine these relationships among adolescents aged 12–17 and then again when they were 25–32. Add Health sampled 132 US high schools and their feeder schools in 1994–1995. On a given class period all students in a school completed a questionnaire which asked them, among other things, to list their race/ethnicity and the names of up to five classmates who were their friends. This produced school friendship networks for 90,000 7th to 12th graders, the degree to which friendship ties were reciprocated, each individual's perception of their race and Hispanic identity, and each school's race, Hispanic, and social class composition. A subsample (n = 20,745) was interviewed in their homes at multiple points in time, including Wave IV interviews (n = 15,701) in 2007–2008. The in-home interviews used computer-assisted self-interviewing to collect rosters of romantic/sexual partners. The descriptive findings are interesting in themselves, but the authors highlight their theoretical and policy relevance. The most prominent finding is that same-race friendship and romantic relationships are still the norm, happening much more frequently than what one would expect on the basis of school-based opportunities for such contacts. This is especially true for Whites and Blacks, and much less so for Hispanics and Asians. The authors see multiple race lines existing in the United States: clear lines between Whites and non-Whites, as well as between Blacks and non-Blacks, but more permeable lines for Hispanics and Asians. Gender further complicates the patterns found, especially with respect to romantic relationships. Black women have many fewer interracial romantic relationships than Black men, and young Asian men have few romantic relationships of any kind. The policy relevance of this research is clearest with respect to the effect of attending a racially diverse school and of having a different-race friend during adolescence on the likelihood of having an interracial romantic relationship in adulthood (Chapter 6). Both significantly increase this likelihood, an association the authors take as empirical support for Gordon Allport's contact theory that face-to-face interaction with members of other groups may encourage individuals to develop more favorable attitudes toward those groups. The research is summarized in Chapter 1. Chapters 2 through 6 offer in-depth treatments of particular topics. Chapter 3, for instance, covers how Hispanic relationship patterns are affected by racial, socioeconomic and immigrant status differences. Same-sex romance is examined in Chapter 5. Each chapter starts with an overview of competing theories and of past research before focusing on the authors’ findings. Both the writing and the analysis, mainly bar and line graphs, make the work accessible to undergraduate students and the general audience.