Attitudes and Values of Adolescent Europeans towards Europeanisation

Based on original empirical data collected from adolescents in Europe (N=9003) this paper focuses on the lifeworlds of young people. It analyses negative and positive patterns of attitude and combines them with further concepts: first, personal life perspectives, various key values and political attitudes, second, religious attitudes towards church(es), religions, world views and religious education. Technically, the attitude towards Europe acts as the dependent variable whereas the remaining concepts are used as independent variables. The empirical results show Turkish and Polish adolescents are more critical of Europe than adolescents living in “old” Europe. Furthermore, the data show that those who have negative expectations about their personal futures and follow a more traditional religious world view are likely also to be Eurosceptical

A nine country survey of youth in Europe: selected findings and issues

A nine country survey of the life orientations, values and institutional trust of 8948 young people at the upper end of the secondary school age range was set up at the University of Würzburg in the year 2000. Key findings demonstrate that these young people value personal autonomy and are orientated to success in their professional lives and that they especially trust human rights and environmental groups. Religion is associated positively with humanitarianism and in some countries negatively with modernity. These findings provide an indication of the typical life stances of future opinion-formers and illustrate methodological issues thrown up by international research

Assessing sectarian attitudes among Catholic adolescents in Scotland

Sectarianism is perceived as a serious issue in Scotland despite a lack of concrete evidence, according to the Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism. This paper addresses one of the gaps in knowledge, the attitudes of Catholic school pupils. Our research was designed to profile sectarian attitudes among a sample of Catholic school pupils in Scotland, using our own newly designed Scale of Catholic Sectarian Attitudes. The research assessed the influence of five sets of factors on shaping individual differences in sectarian attitudes: personal factors (sex and age), psychological factors (personality), religious factors (identity, belief, and practice), theological factors (exclusivism), and contextual factors (Catholic schools). The study draws on data provided by 797 13- to 15-year-old school pupils from schools in Scotland who self-identified as Roman Catholic. We offer a new tool for measuring attitudes to sectarianism and also findings that demonstrate that sectarian attitudes exist within the young Catholic community in Scotland and that this has possibly become part of a wider problem generated by the public visibility of religious diversity within an increasingly secular society. Further we find that Sectarian attitudes are higher among males than among females and are higher among nominal Catholics than among practising Catholics

Young people's attitudes to religious diversity : quantitative approaches from social psychology and empirical theology

This essay discusses the design of the quantitative component of the ‘Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity’ project, conceived by Professor Robert Jackson within the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, and presents some preliminary findings from the data. The quantitative component followed and built on the qualitative component within a mixed method design. The argument is advanced in seven steps: introducing the major sources of theory on which the quantitative approach builds from the psychology of religion and from empirical theology; locating the empirical traditions of research among young people that have shaped the study; clarifying the notions and levels of measurement employed in the study anticipating the potential for various forms of data analysis; discussing some of the established measures incorporated in the survey; defining the ways in which the sample was structured to reflect the four nations of the UK, and London; illustrating the potential within largely descriptive cross-tabulation forms of analysis; and illustrating the potential within more sophisticated multivariate analytic models