From exposure to contact: Neighbourhood change, intergroup contact and ethnic attitudes in Aotearoa New Zealand

Cities bring different groups into proximity, but proximity does not itself produce meaningful encounter. This article examines when neighbourhood diversity becomes socially consequential by distinguishing residential exposure from realised intergroup contact. Using sixteen waves of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study linked to neighbourhood ethnic composition, we follow 76,253 respondents across 371,042 observations and 39,422 residential moves in Aotearoa New Zealand. We estimate individual and wave fixed-effects models to examine whether changes in the local presence of Maori, Asian, Pacific, and NZ European residents are associated with changes in contact with those groups, and whether contact is associated with warmer outgroup evaluations. We find that increases in a group’s neighbourhood share are consistently associated with greater contact with that group. Contact, in turn, is associated with warmer attitudes. When neighbourhood composition and contact are included together, the direct association between composition and warmth is small and statistically indistinguishable from zero, while the contact–warmth association remains stable. A benchmark that assumes proportional mixing locally further shows that contact does not simply follow area demography: minority respondents encounter their own groups at higher rates than other groups, while Asian residents are encountered at lower rates generally. These findings suggest that neighbourhood composition forms an opportunity structure whose attitudinal significance depends on whether urban routines, institutions, and everyday spaces convert exposure into interaction.