The Role of All-Day Schooling in Friendship Segregation Between Students with Different Language Backgrounds

Abstract All-day schools in Germany aim to provide increased opportunities for friendships between students with different language backgrounds as compared to half-day schools. Moreover, the extended shared time spent during extracurricular activities might foster friendships between students with different native languages and reduce language-based segregation in students’ friendship networks. This study investigated friendships between students with the same native language (language-based friendship segregation) and compared them across half-day and all-day schools to test these propositions. We analyzed social network data from the IQB Trends in Student Achievement 2018 study, including information from 28,239 secondary school students (mean age 15.51 years; 49.7% girls), of whom 17,004 attended half-day schools and 11,235 attended all-day schools. We conducted separate analyses for German and non-German native speakers using multilevel analyses and applied propensity score matching to control for school-selection effects. Our results reveal that all-day schooling is associated with lower language-based friendship segregation for German native speakers but not for non-German native speakers. This difference in friendship segregation among German native speakers can be attributed neither to varying opportunity structures for intergroup friendships nor to varying participation in extracurricular activities. We discuss the results in terms of the goals of all-day schooling, implications for educational practices, and future research needs.