Attitudes of national populations towards social and civil rights for family members and the role of the EU in converging these rights: A cross-national pilot study (Deliverable 9.4)

Deliverable 9.4  aims to investigate the relationship between the effects of existing discrepancies between civil, political, social, and economic citizenship rights on the one hand, and obligations of European and non-European citizens as family members moving across borders on the other. The goal of Deliverable 9.4 is to provide insights on national attitudes towards several key themes, including: family and reproductive rights across diverse family forms in Europe, attitudes towards gender roles, attitudes towards European efforts to converge social and civil rights for family members and attitudes on the portability of these rights while moving within Europe. These insights are provided through a discussion of our analysis of existing data and literature and results from our six-country pilot study.

Task 9.4 was carried out in four stages, including: a) an investigation into existing cross-national, European datasets to determine to what extent data and survey scales exist that attempt to measure these national attitudes within EU countries; b) a literature review, which synthesized research using existing items and item scales across these four themes; c) a six-country pilot study conducted in Croatia, Denmark, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain to test newly developed items on these attitudes; d) statistical analyses on the data from the pilot study to describe respondents’ attitudes towards these issues as well as to determine whether cross-country differences are evident.

The main finding of the review is that the data available on these national attitudes varies considerably, as does the use of attitudinal data in social science literature. No existing data could be found that directly assesses national attitudes on a number of topics key to WP9. Hence, a questionnaire was developed to explore these attitudes. The pilot study, conducted between December 2014 and March 2015, obtained a selected sample of youth, all within tertiary education in the Humanities and Social Sciences, mostly without children, and mostly from higher-level socio-economic family backgrounds. Within this selected sample, cross-country differences in attitudes in the four themes explored were evident, reflecting the social embededdness of attitudes, particularly in relation to social and civil rights. However, cross-country differences were not evident across each of the themes. For example, while countries appear to be polarized between more traditional countries (i.e. Italy and Croatia) and less traditional countries (Spain and the Netherlands) in terms of the convergence of rights between heterosexual and homosexual couples, in all countries, there seems to be greater acceptance towards equality in social rights rather than civil rights. These findings help to fill important gaps in our current understanding of attitudes towards social and civil rights in contemporary Europe