Predictors of ethnocentrism among whites

We saw in an earlier post that ethnocentrism increases among Jews as one moves in an orthodox direction.  Is that true of other whites as well?

For a preliminary analysis, I looked at potential predictors of tribalism among whites (with closeness to one's ethnic group as the measure (ETHCLOSE)): low IQ, low education, low job prestige, political conservatism, and church attendance. None of those is more than trivially related to ethnocentrism--correlations were all well under .1.

The measures in the table above were the only ones I could find that seemed predictive. I entered all of them into an OLS regression model and displayed the results above. Being female and living in the south are the only factors significantly related to feeling close to one's ethnicity. The effect of being a fundamentalist falls just short of statistical significance.  Racialism, measured as favoring a law against marriage between blacks and whites, is unrelated to ethnocentrism. Looking at the betas, you can see that gender, southernness, and fundamentalism all have a similar impact (if you ignore the lack of significance for fundamentalism).

I checked to see if females were responding more than males to the "feeling" aspect of the question. When we substitute thinking your ethnicity is important to a sense of who you are (ETHIMP), the gender effect disappears. I can see there are other differences as well, but that will have to wait until next time.