Measuring and Explaining School Children’s Attitudes towards Immigrants in Switzerland and Poland

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Abstract

In the last decade there has been a shift to the far right in many European Societies. This is especially true for attitudes towards immigrants and the public debate of such. For years, social scientists have been interested in these attitudes and their development over time. Here the focus usually laid on showcasing the opinions of native adults. In contrast, little is known about children’s and teenager’s attitudes towards immigrants and other minorities.
This lack of research on children might be due to previous measurement difficulties, a problem, this paper aims to overcome by introducing and evaluating a new, child friendly, easily administrable and universally applicable way of measuring children’s attitudes towards minorities: Picture based, self-administered questionnaires. The new measurement will then be applied analysing whether relations between attitudes towards immigrants and certain values found in adults, also exist among children. Here the focus will be placed on the values universalism and conformity-tradition.
For the analyses we use a Swiss-Polish panel data set (2015-2017) collected among school children by the research priority program “social networks” at the University of Zurich. The sample includes 5332 children aged 8 to 19, which allows us to compare the result not only across the two countries, but also across different age groups.
Preliminary results show that the new picture-based measurement works well, however there are significant differences in the influence of universalism and tradition on the attitudes towards immigrants, compared to the relations found in adults.

Authors

• Charlotte Clara Becker, University of Cologne

• Eldad Davidov, University of Cologne and University of Zurich

• Jan Cieciuch, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw

• René Algesheimer, University of Zurich

• Martin Kindschi, University of Zurich

• Heiko Rauhut, University of Zurich

• Alexander Ehlert, University of Zurich

• Claudio Tessone, University of Zurich