Refugee Presence and Perceived Changes in Local Social Norms: A Study of Communities Hosting Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh

Population visibility, daily interactions, institutional responses, material constraints and community solidarity all need to be taken into consideration in understanding perceptions of social change in refugee hosting contexts. This study analyzes the primary survey data of 460 respondents from villages supporting Rohingya refugees and villages adjacent to Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Perceived refugee presence, intergroup contact, perceived resource pressure, perceived cultural distance, institutional trust, community cohesion and perceived changes in local social norms are all connected in a PLS-SEM framework that includes forty measurement indicators. The internal consistency and convergent validity of the measurement model are good with Cronbach’s alpha ranging from 0.878 to 0.938, composite reliability ranging from 0.911 to 0.949, and average variance extracted ranging from 0.672 to 0.728. The structural model accounted for 34.8% of the variance in community cohesion, and 27.9% of the variance in perceived norm change. The associations observed are in the hypothesized direction with institutional trust positively associated with cohesion and cohesion negatively associated with perceived norm change. The overall picture of predictive indicators is good as compared to the linear-model benchmark. A few exported Bootstrap intervals, however, need technical verification prior to inferential reporting. The overall findings of the study can be considered as empirical evidence of the interaction among the Host-Community Perceptions, institutional confidence and cohesion in the social context of Rohingya refugees’ presence in Bangladesh.