Patterns of (In)Tolerance among European Youth. Insights from ICCS 2016.

• In Event: Citizenship and democratic education using large-scale assessments: Person-centered approaches.

Proposal

Tolerance, generally defined as an understanding and endorsement of equality between different groups (Cote and Erikson 2009; van Zalk et al., 2013), is considered an important democratic attitude and an essential prerequisite for a peaceful coexistence in the increasingly diverse contemporary societies (Almond and Verba 1963; Freitag and Rapp, 2015; Sherrod and Lauckhardt 2009). Tolerance of diversity is expected to promote democratic interaction and equitable participation while intolerant attitudes may lead to racism and violence and pose threats to the stability of democratic institutions (Berry and Sam 2014). In the European context, monitoring and promoting tolerance is an essential part of the policies focused on education for democratic citizenship (European Council 2015). Against this background, several policy and research contributions, point to the need for more comparative data to measure and monitor cross-national differences in young people’s tolerant attitudes. Next, to promoting tolerant attitudes for all students, a particular emphasis in European education policy signals the need to identify, prevent and tackle extreme views (e.g. intolerance) in youth.
International studies such as ICCS, are valuable tools in charting tolerant attitudes among youth (conceptualized as young people’s beliefs about equal political and cultural rights and opportunities for three different groups in society based on immigration background, ethnic/racial status and gender). Nonetheless, current research applied to these data (e.g. Sandoval-Hernandez et al. 2018; Schulz, et al. 2018) often focuses on average comparisons (e.g. highlighting overall country differences in levels of tolerance). While these comparisons make an important contribution to monitoring such outcomes, such analytic strategies are less efficient in providing information regarding extreme views (e.g. identifying groups of “highly intolerant” youth based on several indicators that could be the target of tailored interventions).
The aim of the current study is to add to current research by identifying potential patterns of (in)tolerance among European youth. To this end, I make use of the ICCS 2016 student data (N=51040) for 14 European countries on three scales used to measure: a) student attitudes toward equal rights for immigrants, b) student attitudes toward equal rights for all ethnic/racial groups, and c) student attitudes toward gender equality. The data analysis is/will be conducted in a factor mixture framework that combines confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and latent class analysis (LCA). CFA is applied with the aim of identifying interrelated items that describe the three constructs of interest and generate factor scores. LCA is applied to identify profiles of individuals based on similarities in their scale scores. Both analyses involve measurement invariance tests to asses the cross-cultural comparability of scales/profiles and take into account the multilevel character of the data.
Results (of multiple-group CFA) indicate that three scales can be successfully compared among the 14 European countries. Moreover, the comparisons of factors scores suggest that both low (e.g. Bulgaria) and high (e.g. Sweden) average scores could be coupled with high degrees of polarization (measured as the gap between the 95th and 5th percentile). Subsequent (LCA) analyses will provide further information regarding potential patterns of (in)tolerance among European youth.

Author

• Maria Magdalena Isac, University of Groningen