Investigation of students' perceptions of national identity

Abstract

The concept of identity is described as a set of characteristics that an individual or a group of individuals possess and what makes them unique and different from others. In other words, identity is about culture, social life, traditions and customs as well as attitude, perception and a belief system of people. The identity which is unique to a particular nation and brings together individuals with feelings of belonging to a particular community is called a national identity. National identity is the expression of belonging to a national culture. The National Identity Perception Scale developed by Gelisli was used to collect the data. Descriptive analyses (mean and standard deviation), Mann - Whitney U test and Kruskal - Wallis H test were performed to analyse the data. The results revealed that secondary and high school students possessed a high level of national identity. Moreover, it was found that gender influenced the students' perceptions of national identity. Keywords: Identity, national identity, national culture.