Survey on attitudes and behaviour of French people towards immigrants

In the early 1950s, the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) identified, as part of their areas of interest, research on foreigners living in France, as well as the attitudes of the French population towards these foreigners. This important scientific work was subsequently undertaken in partnership with UNESCO (the department of social sciences on social tensions).

For the past century, France had been one of the main European countries of migration: it has regularly welcomed workers or persecuted people for a variety of reasons. Due to its large migrant population, the question of how these migrants have been assimilating into their host country has become increasingly of interest. In more general terms, the question concerned the type of psychosocial relations that can be established within a given territory between the autochthonous population and migrants: their attitudes, which are more or less conscious, largely influence their respective behaviours, and it is these attitudes that researchers have been trying to understand. How can we reduce latent or explicit social tensions, which are largely developed in the psyche, without knowing the causes that provoke them?

It was therefore important in 1951 to examine in depth all the various ways in which the presence of migrants in France has affected them and the nation.
As such, the first survey to be undertaken (which is what is described here) focused on examining the behaviour and attitudes of the French towards migrants, as well as observing five different groups of distinct national origin, each made up of a hundred migrant families.