Citizenship Norms Among Native and Immigrant Students from a European Perspective

Abstract

The unprecedented diversity in student populations in Europe resulting from the recent rapid influx of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers is an important challenge to implementing inclusive citizenship education across Europe. Current European policy frameworks in education stress that citizenship education needs to promote common attitudes and values in the entire student population while respecting cultural diversity. Nevertheless, existing research on citizenship education tends to give only a fragmented picture. More research is needed to systematically address potential attitudinal differences between groups of students defined by migration background. To this end, this chapter analyzes potential differences in citizenship norms between 36,197 grade 8 immigrant and native-born students across nine European countries participating in IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016. More specifically, using multiple group multinomial logistic regression analyses, it investigates the relationship between immigration status and citizenship norms in the nine European countries, while taking into account other individual level characteristics, such as gender, socioeconomic status, and civic knowledge. The study reveals that in most of the countries native-born and immigrant students tend to endorse similar configurations of citizenship norms. When differences in adherence exist (in four out of the nine European countries), the most solid finding indicates that immigrant students are more likely to hold comprehensive citizenship norms when compared to their native-born peers. The findings contribute toward identifying potential differences in citizenship norms among native-born and immigrant students in several European countries. The results may be used to inform future studies and initiatives aimed at identifying and understanding the motivations behind endorsing different configurations of citizenship norms among different groups of students.