Does similarity between immigrants and the native population promote natives’ intergroup contact intentions? While it has been shown that contact between natives and immigrants often leads to positive outcomes such as a better minority labor market performance or a reduction in prejudice, the factors that encourage natives to engage in intergroup contact are less clear. In this paper, I investigate whether sharing sociodemographic similarities motivates natives to engage in contact with immigrants in a hypothetical scenario. Drawing on seminal theories in sociology (Simmel 1908, Blau and Schwartz 1984), I argue that group boundaries can be overcome more easily when natives and immigrants are similar in other characteristics. To test this hypothesis, I conduct an original conjoint experiment embedded within one wave of the German Internet Panel (GIP), an online survey based on a random probability sample of the German general population (aged between 16 and 75). Specifically, I use a paired conjoint design to test natives’ preferences when choosing an intercultural (language) tandem partner. This design allows disentangling the effects of different sociodemographic variables, and previous research has shown that its results are likely to reflect real-world behavior. Each respondent is presented with a table featuring two immigrants next to each other, who randomly differ in gender, age, level of education, marital status, and parental status. The respondents are then asked to decide which of the two immigrants they would prefer as a tandem partner (forced choice). In total, each of the 3,500 respondents has to make five decisions, resulting in an evaluation of ten profiles per respondent. In addition to the conjoint experiment itself, respondents are also surveyed on their own sociodemographic characteristics. The data are analyzed using conditional average marginal component effects (AMCEs) to determine whether native respondents prefer to start a tandem partnership with immigrants who are similar to them rather than those dissimilar.
