Measuring school children\u2019s attitudes toward immigrants in Switzerland and Poland

Charlotte Clara Becker,Jan Cieciuch,Martin Kindschi,Eldad Davidov,René Algesheimer

doi:10.1186/s42409-020-00017-0

Abstract

For decades, social scientists have been interested in studying individual attitudes toward ethnic minorities or immigrants and their development over time. Whereas these attitudes have been commonly studied among adults, little is known about children’s and teenager’s attitudes toward immigrant minorities. This gap might have been a result of a lack of standardized, cost-effective, and efficient large-scale survey measures tailored to young people. In the current study, we try to overcome this gap by introducing and validating a new, child-friendly, easily administrable picture-based survey measure of attitudes toward immigrants belonging to two ethnic minorities: blacks and Muslims.For this purpose, we collected a panel dataset at three measurement time points in two countries, Switzerland and Poland, including 5332 school children and teenagers aged 8 to 19 years, divided into three age cohorts. We performed confirmatory factor analyses within and across the samples and found that the new picture-based measures were reliable and highly comparable across measurement time points, age cohorts, and country samples. The findings suggest that picture-based measures may be a promising tool to measure attitudes among children.

Highlights

Rationale and structure In the last decade, the number of votes for right-leaning parties in newly elected parliaments has increased (Akkerman, de Lange, & Rooduijn, 2016), and this rise has been accompanied by a shift of the political orientation of Europeans toward the far right and high levels of negative attitudes toward immigrants (Decker & Brähler, 2018)
(2) The invariance test across age cohorts, waves, and countries constrained measurement parameters to be equal both across age cohorts, countries, and waves. It demonstrated that scalar invariance was given across all these dimensions
The invariance tests implied that the measures were understood by children belonging to different age cohorts and at different time points as well as across countries

Summary

Introduction

Rationale and structure In the last decade, the number of votes for right-leaning parties in newly elected parliaments has increased (Akkerman, de Lange, & Rooduijn, 2016), and this rise has been accompanied by a shift of the political orientation of Europeans toward the far right and high levels of negative attitudes toward immigrants (Decker & Brähler, 2018). Even politicians do not refrain from publicly proclaiming their negative sentiments toward certain ethnic and religious immigrant groups (Decker & Brähler, 2018) These negative attitudes toward minorities have been a major topic of investigation among social scientists for several decades (Aydin, Krueger, Frey, Kastenmüller, & Fischer, 2014; Berry & Kalin, 1995; Esses, Jackson, & Armstrong, 1998; Powdermaker, 1944). Their studies examined the level, development, and possible sources of such attitudes among adult populations (Berthoff, 1951; Decker & Brähler, 2018; Rustenbach, 2010; Savelkoul, Scheepers, van der Veld, & Hagendoorn, 2012). Children’s attitudes may foreshadow present and future societal

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Conclusion