Multicultural Education: Cultural Space among Public University Students in Malaysia

Abstract

The article aims to examine cultural diversity levels and problems among students in Malaysian public universities (PU) covering six cultural diversity criteria, namely ethnicity, language, religion, gender, socioeconomic status as well as mental and physical abilities. Respondents consisted of 330 students who had met two requirements: coming from different varieties of cultural backgrounds and were students of semester three and above. The research instrument used was a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire consisted of 30 item questions. The findings showed that Cronbach's alpha value showed strong reliability of more than 0.7. Actual study findings showed that the language, gender and religion criteria were at high; medium level for mental and physical abilities and ethnicity criteria; low level for socioeconomic status criterion. As for the problems of cultural diversity, all six criteria showed low level. Correlational relationship between the problems of cultural diversity criteria also demonstrated that each criterion had a weak significant relationship between the overall cultural diversity with an r value of less than 0.29 (p<0.01). It was discovered that socioeconomic status criteria needed to be emphasised as the criteria level value was still low and should be given attention. It can be concluded that there were almost no cultural diversity problems among PU students. The implication of this study is expected to facilitate the designing of strategic plans to address the issues among the various cultures in Malaysia.