Author Identifier

Tessa Phipps

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0228-4820

Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Edith Cowan University

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (Psychology) Honours

School

School of Arts and Humanities

First Supervisor

Associate Professor Justine Dandy

Second Supervisor

Dr Zoe Leviston

Abstract

The worldwide movement of migrants has increased rapidly in recent years and the resulting increase in cultural diversity can lead to tensions in receiving societies. In the Australian context, while negative attitudes towards Australia’s immigration intake remain the minority, such attitudes have increased over the past two years. Concepts of fairness, both procedural and distributive, have been shown to be important factors in attitudes towards immigrants and the very nature of the immigration context brings to the fore concepts of in- and out-group dynamics and national identity. This study created a reliable procedural fairness scale for utilisation in the immigration context. Exploration of the relationship between procedural and distributive fairness demonstrated a pattern whereby higher judgement of procedural fairness was related to a perception that immigrants are unfairly advantaged – a novel pattern in the theoretical context. The hypothesis that participants who indicated a judgement of low levels of procedural fairness would polarise in their distributive fairness judgements based on national identity strength was not borne out by the data. Exploration and analysis of a previously utilised distributive fairness scale illuminated limitations to its applicability and further illustrated the potential impact of variables such as status, security, entitlement and legitimacy in this domain.

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