Fostering a Commitment to Social Action: How Talking, Thinking, and Feeling Make a Difference in Intergroup Dialogue

Intergroup dialogue is designed to foster commitment to action. This article analyzes papers written by students in 52 intergroup dialogue courses (N = 739) to test a theoretical model of how intergroup dialogue is expected to encourage frequency of acting to educate others and to collaborate with others. The theoretical model posits that dialogue pedagogy fosters distinctive communication processes, which influence psychological processes that, in turn, relate to action (Nagda, 2006 Nagda, B. A. 2006. Breaking barriers, crossing boundaries, building bridges: Communication processes in intergroup dialogues. Journal of Social Issues, 62: 553–576. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Sorensen, Nagda, Gurin, & Maxwell, 2009 Sorensen, N., Nagda, B. A., Gurin, P. and Maxwell, K. 2009. Taking a “hands on” approach to diversity in higher education: A critical-dialogic model for effective intergroup interaction. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 9(1): 3–35. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Statistical analyses of the number of references to each of these concepts that were coded in the students’ papers provide substantial support for the model. Dialogue pedagogy, communication processes, and psychological processes all influenced how much students wrote about action, and the influence of these concepts conforms to the theoretical model. Results also show that educating others was written about more by students in race/ethnicity dialogues than in gender dialogues, at least partially because students in race/ethnicity dialogues also wrote more about the communication processes and psychological processes that specifically related to educating others.