Ethnic stereotypes in Sweden in the 21st century

The aim of this project is to map the content and meanings of ethnic stereotypes in Sweden. Our focus is set on the stability and change of stereotypes associated with different groups of foreign-born people and how these possibly interact with the stability and change of characteristics of different groups of foreign-born people, such as size, region of origin, average level of education, and gender composition. We use texts collected from different social media in the Korp text database, developed in the national research infrastructure Språkbanken. The Korp social media text database is large-scale, comprising over 100 billion words spanning the period 1998-2024, from the early days of the internet until today. To analyze how stereotypes manifest themselves online, we use machine learning-based quantitative text analysis of how certain nouns, adjectives and verbs are associated with different groups, and qualitative in-depth readings of a selection of these texts, focusing on occasions when the content, meaning and context of these stereotypes change. We thus relate quantitative as well as qualitative changes in stereotypes to changes in the characteristics of different groups of foreign-born people in Sweden. We contribute on a fundamental level to research on structural conditions behind changes in stereotypes; how and why stereotypes change over time in societies.