Helping Syrian Refugees Identity Effects On Political Support Helping Intentions And Helping Behaviour PDF Download

Background: The need for international community support, coupled with a lack of funding for that support, are recurrent features of refugee emergencies, including those from Syria. Thus, this research aims to identify some factors that affect individual helping responses towards refugee emergencies. In doing so, it employs a social identity approach to examine ingroup/outgroup helping towards refugees, by specifically focusing on religious identity.Methods: In Study 1 (N = 337), the predicting role of perceived similarity on political support and helping intention was explored, in a quasi-experimental design with three different participant groups (British non-Muslims, British Muslims, and Turkish Muslims). In Study 2 (N = 621), the religion of Syrian refugees was manipulated (i.e. control, Christian, and Muslim). The effects of religious-identity interaction between British non-Muslims and Syrian refugees on perceived similarity, political support, helping intention, and helping behaviour were scrutinised. Data was collected through online surveys in both studies.Findings: Study 1 showed that compared to British non-Muslims, Turkish Muslims and British Muslims were more likely to perceive Syrian refugees as similar to themselves and more to them. Study 2 showed that Christians were more likely to help Syrian refugees in Christian condition than in control and Muslim conditions whereas for nonbelievers, there was no difference in terms of helping Syrian refugees in control, Christian, and Muslim conditions.Discussion: The instability of governmental supports suggests an important role for research examining individual efforts to help Syrian refugees. In the light of this, the results of this research shows that different strategies should be used for different potential helper groups. More specifically, considering the religious ingroup/outgroup identity of refugees to be helped and improving potential helpersu2019 perception of similarity with refugees could yield more effective outcomes for promoting help and support for refugees.