Orientations of Young Men and Women to Citizenship and European Identity

Orientations of Young Men and Women to Citizenship and European Identity Project Co-ordinator: Lynn Jamieson; Co-investigators: Gabriel Bianchi, Klaus Boehnke, Susan Condor, Hector Grad, Ladislav Machacek, Maria Ros and Claire Wallace; Researchers: Georg Datler, Daniel Fuss, Gema Garcia-Albacete, Sue Grundy, Barbara Lasticova, Miryam Rodriguez-Monter, Reingard Spannring.

European Commission 5 th Framework Programme Overall aim to provide insight into how young men and women feel about ‘being European’ and European citizenship Requires broader exploration of: how people construct their identity; how people see opportunities and constraints shaping their future. A multi-disciplinary project

Regional, national and European identities in interaction. Attitudes towards the EU and its enlargement ‘Doing Europe’: Languages, travel and mobility Active Citizens? The engagement of young people in Europe. Attitudes to immigration and cultural diversity Europe’s ‘Others’ Young People, Islam and European Identity

Our subjects/respondents Men and women making a gender comparison possible. aged years old allowing a focus on ‘new citizens’, the youngest group with voting rights and responsibilities of citizenship Residents of selected sites in Europe.

Choice of localities Focused on residents of cities or towns because then people potentially shared a local identity, as well as a regional or national identity The cities/towns are in regions and nations chosen because of their different relationships to ‘Europe’.

The sites of the project: our subjects’ places of residence Vienna and the main towns in the Bregenz area of Vorarlberg in Austria. Prague and Bratislava in the Czech and Slovak Republics Chemnitz and Bielefeld, in Germany but formerly ‘East’ and ‘West’ Germany. Madrid, the capital, and Bilbao, in the Basque Country, Spain. Edinburgh, Scotland and Manchester, England in the UK.

Two samples in each locality A representative sample, across all social backgrounds and career paths, of year old men and women who had lived in the locality for at least five years A group of residents chosen because they were more likely to feel European because their study or work was Europe-oriented – our ‘target sample’. They were a more highly educated group.

Quantitative data: the surveys Structured questionnaire developed collaboratively in English and translated Questions to explore attitudes, understandings, experiences and practices Preparatory pilot work Surveys administered in 2002 Some local variations but basically all worked to a common script

Qualitative data: in-depth interviews Some people who had completed the survey in 2002 were then interviewed in 2003 Interviewees were selected on the basis of their answer to a survey question concerning their strength of feeling about being European. Two groups were selected: those who expressed no or little feeling and those who expressed strong feelings.

Numbers of respondents In our surveys in each locality we aimed for a representative sample of 400 and a target sample of 100. In our in-depth interviews we aimed for 24 interviews split between people with no or little feeling of being European and those with a strong feeling of being European. These figures were not fully achieved in all ten localities respondents took part in our representative samples, 799 in our target samples and 244 in in-depth interviews.

Orientations of Young Men and Women to Citizenship and European Identity