Abstract
The factors that affect Human Development Index have been investigated extensively in previous researches. These studies consider education as an important factor and focus on the quality of education such as teachers’ skills, educational facilities and student conditions. Democracy has also been established as an important factor in HDI. In this study, we examined two variables, the democracy index and the land language index as fundamental variables of the Human Development Index (HDI). The land language index is a new variable created to signify the importance of the medium of instruction in higher education institutes, particularly in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. We performed a multiple-correlation analysis with the available data to find the correlation of these two indices on HDI. We found that together, the democracy index and land language index had a strong correlation to HDI. The results of this study can have a significant impact on social scientists and policymakers and should be considered for further research.
Highlights
Finding factors that improve the quality of human life has always been important for social scientists and policymakers
We present the result by Descriptive statistics for Human Development Index, Land Language Index and Democracy Index charts, Model Summary of the linear regression analysis for Human Development Index, Land Language Index table and Democracy Index, and ANOVA for Human Development Index, Land Language Index and Democracy Index table
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) developed the Human Development Index (HDI) to classify countries based on specific variables, but it isn’t clear how other factors such as language in education and level of democracy impact HDI
Summary
Finding factors that improve the quality of human life has always been important for social scientists and policymakers. Human Development Index (HDI) is a widely accepted index created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as a measurement for the quality of human life in each country. HDI is a summary measure of three indices: health, the standard of living and education. The health dimension is assessed by life expectancy at birth, the standard of living dimension is assessed by gross national income per capita and the education dimension is a combination of expected years of schooling for children entering school and mean years of schooling for adults 25 years and over (UNDP, 2018). One important factor in the quality of education is the Medium of Instruction (MOI). MOI is the language used in classrooms between teachers and students and is an important factor for language policy planning as it can affect areas of learning such as lessons, test-taking and classroom interactions. In Hong Kong, a study done on MOI showed that the relationship between MOI and classroom interactions were better when the medium of instruction was the first language of the students (Lo & Macaro, 2012)
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