OISE Brown Bag: Network Analysis of Global Citizenship Attitudes

Global citizenship, like all abstract concepts, is hard to define, operationalize, and measure. Previous efforts to clarify the concept of global citizenship refer to an ideology that is somewhat incompatible with an exclusive national identity. But how can citizenship attitudes and identity be studied? The recently proposed Causal Attitude Network model offers a new way to think about and study attitudes, suggesting that attitudes are represented as networks of causally connected evaluative reactions toward individual issues. In this model, individual nodes can influence each other, giving rise to a dynamic system of citizenship-related beliefs or attitudes. To examine this system, we apply network analysis to data from the European Values Study (EVS). Specifically, we investigate the network structure of 33 reactions to issues regarding citizenship, immigration, and national and international politics, finding a strongly connected network of issue-related attitudes. Community analysis identifies clusters of closely related items, but also connections between clusters that suggest that different attitudes form bridges between different aspects of global citizenship. Next, centrality analysis reveals attitudes that are strategically positioned in the network to have a strong influence on the broader belief system. A final simulation study derives hypotheses regarding how changes in single attitudes, for instance due to education or persuasion, may impact the overall citizenship identity. We conclude that network analysis can improve our understanding of the structure of citizenship ideology, its fuzziness and dynamics, and discuss future opportunities to study attitudes in the context of citizenship education.

Presented by Dr. Raphaela Schlicht-Schmälzle, Vohla Chykina & Dr. Ralf Schmälzle.

This is a presentation of the Office of International Studies in Education’s Spring Brown Bag Series on International Research.