14 Ellie Oppenheim et al. social policy attitudes towards stateless people, may reduce discriminatory attitudes or behaviour (see Pedersen and Hartley, 2015 for suggested intervention approaches). As media has been shown to influence prejudice, perceived threat, and political orientation (Vliegenthart et al., 2012; Sheets et al., 2016), interventions targeting inaccurate or sensationalist media reporting of migration and statelessness-related issues, may also be effective in reducing discrimination. Limitations and future research Whilst this research elucidates several useful findings, there are methodological limitations to the study design. Quantitative surveys cannot capture nuances in participants’ attitudes or experiences. Future research could use a qualitative framework to supplement this article’s findings. The cross-sectional design is also a limitation, as causality cannot be established. Longitudinal or experimental research into the psychological and social processes by which different variables influence attitude formation towards stateless people, asylum seekers, and refugees is required. In addition, the social policy attitudes disclosed by participants were likely informed by a specific understanding of statelessness based on the definition provided. Outside of this survey, UK residents might have different understanding, or express different attitudes towards stateless people. The definition of statelessness provided also did not summarise the legal status of stateless people. As such participants may have assumed that, unlike refugees, and similar to asylum seekers, stateless people may not have leave to remain in the UK. This might explain the finding that social policy attitudes towards stateless people were more restrictive than those towards refugees. Furthermore, the video definition for statelessness may have primed participants differently compared to the written definitions for asylum seekers and refugees. Response order effects could also have influenced results. The study’s sample also does not reflect the distribution of the UK population across different demographic characteristics. Future studies should try to replicate the findings of this study using a more representative sample, perhaps through more targeted recruitment. There were also limitations to some of the measures used. To keep the survey short, single item measures were used to assess political orientation, contact, prejudice, and perceived threat. These may have lower construct validity than multiple item measures. For example, the use of a 0–100 scale for participants to rate their political orientation from left-wing (0) to right-wing (100) relies on individual interpretation of ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ (Bauer et al., 2017) and may conflate economic and cultural dimensions of political orientation. Similarly, construct validity may have been improved by utilising Pattison and Davidson’s (2019) measure of perceived threat, which assesses four dimensions of perceived threat, including realistic threat, symbolic threat, intergroup anxiety, and negative stereotypes. Moreover, given research suggesting that type and context of intergroup contact may be associated with differing attitudinal outcomes (McKeown and Dixon, 2017; Vezzali et al., 2017), it would have been beneficial to use a more comprehensive measure of contact to test these associations in our sample. Additionally, our contact measure failed to differentiate between interactions with refugee, asylum seekers, or stateless persons. This may have influenced the contact and social policy association findings, as it is likely that most participants reporting contact had not interacted with a stateless person due their smaller numbers, which may explain why no association was found between contact and social policy attitude towards stateless people. Consequently, it remains unclear whether the absence of an association reflects a limitation of the measure or a genuine lack of relationship. Conclusion This study provides the first quantitative evidence on UK public attitudes towards stateless people and how these compare with attitudes towards asylum seekers and refugees. We engage with these https://doi.org/10.1017/S147474642510119X Published online by Cambridge University Press