Conceptions of global competence among local university students in Hong Kong: a prototype study

• In Event: Global cases studies in higher education

Proposal

1. Introduction
The interconnectedness of our world requires our schools and universities to cultivate graduates who can successfully navigate the interconnected world and contribute towards building a more inclusive and sustainable world (Boix Mansilla & Jackson, 2023). This imperative is well-reflected in global agendas such as UNESCO's adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 and the OECD's Global Competence Framework (OECD, 2018, 2020). Against this backdrop, a rich body of research examines global competence and its development among different groups of people (particularly students) in different societies. However, global competence is a multidimensional concept developed by scholars and international organisations (e.g. OECD), discussed mainly in the Western context, and conflated with concepts like intercultural competence and global citizenship (Chandir, 2022; Parmigiani, Jones, Kunnari, & Nicchia, 2022). Research on understandings of global competence among lay people and in non-Western contexts is limited (Han & Zhu, 2022). Certain conceptualisations have also been critiqued for their tendency to prioritise capacities to navigate the global labour market, cater for the economic interests of the privileged, and ignore issues of global inequalities and injustices (Cobb & Couch, 2018; Robertson, 2021). A systematic review of the literature also shows that research on global competence, including its conceptions, is a scale qualitative study with limited participants (Guo et al., 2024). This research explores how local university students in Hong Kong understand global competence through a prototype study.

2. Methodology: The prototype approach
A prototype approach is an effective method for studying lay conceptualisations of a concept (Fehr, 1988; Rosch, 1975). According to Rosch (1975), a concept has a prototypical structure if it bears certain features more relevant than others in its conceptualisation. This study examines how local university students in Hong Kong construe global competence through a prototype study.
To ensure that this research reflects local Hong Kong university students’ understanding of global competence, it included only participants born and lived in Hong Kong and those who were not born but lived in Hong Kong for more than 7 years (the minimum number of years required for a person not born in Hong Kong to be granted Hong Kong permanent residency). All three rounds of surveys were conducted on the Qualtrics platform. Informed consent was obtained before participants could proceed with survey responses. All studies have been conducted using traditional Chinese. As a relatively new concept in Chinese, there exist different translations for global competence (such as國際素養，全球素養，全球勝任力，國際勝任力). Throughout this research, including all three surveys, 國際素養 was used alongside ‘global competence’ included in a bracket for consistency.
In Study 1, a sample of Hong Kong university student participants were asked to generate exemplars that they regarded spontaneously exemplify what a globally competent person would do or be like and the positivity and negativity of each exemplar. These exemplars were edited and categorised into meaningful features, then ranked by their frequency of occurrence to indicate their relevance to global competence and the prototypicality of global competence. Next, in Study 2, another sample of university students in Hong Kong were invited to rate these features for their centrality to the construct of global competence. Based on the centrality ratings, features were categorised into central, peripheral, and marginal divisions for further investigation. Study 3 tested the ordinal validity of these divisions, correlations between global competence ratings and ratings for other concepts (intercultural competence, career success, social justice), and student ratings of Hong Kong university students’ global competence.

3. Findings and conclusion
Based on the most frequently listed features, for university students in Hong Kong, a globally competent person is someone who respects different cultures (43.68%), follows international news（32.18%), has multilingual capacity (18.39%), is open-minded (17.24%), holds global perspectives (14.94%), is willing to communicate with people from different cultural backgrounds (13.79%), is polite (13.79%), is interested in and has knowledge about international issues（13.79%), knows about different cultures (12.64%), and respects others (10.34%). This reveals a strong tendency among Hong Kong students to view global competence in terms of intercultural, local, and international understandings and dispositions to be open-minded, polite and respectful towards other cultures and people (Deardorff, 2006). The university students’ conceptions of global competence show a rich, loosely connected list of features, demonstrating the lack of a consensual, clear-cut, and classical definition shared by all participants. This, alongside the centrality ranking of features in Study 2 and its validation in Study 3, supports the hypothesis in a prototype approach that some features are mentioned more frequently and viewed as more central to certain concepts than others (Hepper et al., 2012) and confirms that the concept of global competence forms a prototype.
On the one hand, findings in this study resonate with the current, largely Western-based, literature that global competence is an evolving, contested, and multidimensional concept (Chandir, 2022; Han & Zhu, 2022; Hunter et al., 2006; Parmigiani et al., 2022). As discussed, in students’ conceptions of global competence, features related to intercultural understandings, attitudes, knowledge and skills rank high in frequency and centrality. To some extent, this echoes some scholars' interchangeable use of global competence and intercultural competence (Deardorff, 2006; Hunter et al., 2006).On the other hand, this study provides cross-cultural, lay insights with some unique understandings of global competence among local Hong Kong university students, which the local social dynamics might shape.

4. Significance of the study
As the first study to examine the lay conceptions of global competence through a prototype study among local university students in Hong Kong, it first contributes to understanding global competence in a non-Western, cross-cultural, predominantly Chinese context (Hong Kong) with a complicated, changing encounter with globalisation. Secondly, it provides lay (university students) conceptions of global competence beyond definitions and frameworks provided by scholars and international organisations (e.g. OECD). Finally, through three rounds of quantitative surveys, this study offers an understanding of global competence among more participants and more generalizable findings in the current research context.

Author

• Ji Yumjyi Ying, Education University of Hong Kong