Trust and interethnic contact in european neighbourhoods: Evidences from six European cities

European societies and cities are getting more multicultural and heterogeneous. With the years, many European Neighbourhoods have seen how their population has become more multiethnic and multicultural, and the traditional inhabitants of those Neighbourhoods, as well as the new inhabitants, have to adapt to a new environment creating modes of coexistence. The aim of this paper is to test whether in European Neighbourhood interpersonal trust is widely shared by all citizens, or, on the contrary, it is a fragmented trust, shared only by specific groups. We will confront contact theory and conflict theory to test whether contact among different groups at the Neighbourhood level is generating trust, or whether, on the contrary, contact is creating conflict and therefore, is fragmenting social trust in the Neighbourhoods. In order to test these two conflicting hypotheses, we use data from the European project GEITONIES (“GENERATING INTERETHNIC TOLERANCE AND NEIGHBOURHOOD INTEGRATION IN EUROPEAN URBAN SPACES “) conducted between 2008 and 2011 in 6 European cities (Bilbao, Rotterdam, Warsaw, Vienna, Lisbon, Thessaloniki), interviewing 300 natives and 300 immigrants in each of the cities. The method for the hypothesis testing will be multilevel analysis, taking into account both individual and Neighbourhood level variables.