CATCH-EyoU: Processes in Youth's Construction of Active EU Citizenship: Cross-national Longitudinal (Wave 1 and 2) Questionnaires

Abstract

WP7 was designed to address questions concerning young Europeans’ EU citizenship, in particular to shed light on factors relevant in processes of construction of citizenship and their joint workings by way of the quantitative analysis of questionnaire data provided by adolescents and young adults in various situations of life across eight EU countries representing variations in, e.g., their economic situation/crisis, political conditions, and their history as EU member state.

In the overall design of CATCH-EyoU, WP7 figures as a major link building on the initial theoretical work of WP2 by providing information that speaks to the assumptions based on the literature reviewed and the conceptual ideas developed at that point. Moreover, WP7 draws on results yielded by other work packages as far as available at a given stage of WP7 progress feeding into the construction of questionnaires, hypotheses to be tested, and interpretation of findings, respectively. The goal is to, in turn, contribute to an evidence-based finalization of WP2 conceptual efforts meant to integrate the empirical contributions of the different strands of CATCH-EyoU.

At the core of WP7 is a longitudinal assessment using a two wave questionnaire data including a large sample of young people in all countries of the Consortium. After piloting instruments, the first wave of data collection took place in winter 2016/17. Questionnaires, details of the procedure, sample characteristics, and results of preliminary cross-sectional analyses were documented in D7.2 (Findings of wave1: A cross-national report. Noack, Macek 2017). A first set of substantive WP7 wave 1 findings have been presented in a special issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology (Volume 15, 2018 - Issue 3; Being both – A European and a national citizen? Comparing young people’s identification with Europe and their home country across eight European countries. Landberg et.al 2017) as well as in various presentations addressing scientific and broader public audiences. The major reason for establishing a longitudinal data set is the study of processes of the development of major aspects of EU citizenship among youth which entails analyzing the influence of factors such as individual characteristics or conditions met in the family and in school on, e.g., young people’s identification with Europe and political participation. This implies to run analyses that capture the direction of effects as postulated on theoretical grounds which is not possible with a cross-sectional data set but requires sophisticated analyses of longitudinal data.

The dataset contains more than 12600 questionnaires submitted to adolescents and young adults from Italy, Sweden, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic, UK, and Estonia.

The data can be reused by researchers who want to compare our data with similar data focusing on other aspects of attitudinal and identity development in youths. Likewise, stakeholders may be interested in reanalyzing our data particularly with a focus on descriptive survey-type information on the development of European citizenship in adolescence and early adulthood.

File specifics

This final working dataset is a cleaned version of raw data. The cleaning procedure involved (1) removing participants who left the survey on first pages of the questionnaire; (2) removing participants with clearly unreliable responses (i.e. choosing the same response option through the questionnaire); (3) removing participants who indicated age under 14 or over 30 in both waves, or indicated age under 14 or over 30 in one wave and had a missing value on age in the other.

Three general filter variables based on participants’ age are present in the dataset:

• Fltr_age1 – selects participants who indicated age between 14-30 at least in one wave (i.e. filters out all participants with unknown age)
• Fltr_age2 – selects participants who never indicated age beyond 14-30 (the age might be unknown)
• Fltr_age3 – selects participants who indicated age between 14-30 at least in one wave and never indicated age beyond 14-30

The last filter variable is the strictest one (it combines the previous two) and it is recommended for use if it is essential that only people from the given age group are included in the analyses.

Two additional filter variables based on participants’ age are provided for each wave (A_Filter_Age1, A_Filter_Age2, B_Filter_Age1, B_Filter_Age2). These filters can be used if data from wave 1 or wave 2 are analyzed separately.

There are four general variables in the dataset: participants’ unique identification code (ID), country of data collection (Country), participant’s attendance in the study (Attn; indicating his or her participation in wave 1 only, wave 2 only, or both waves), and cohort (Cohort; younger versus older). Please note that the cohort variable does not strictly refer to participants’ actual age, but it indicates whether he or she completed the questionnaire intended for adolescents (younger) or young adults (older).

Names of variables from wave 1 start with letter “A_”, while names of variables from wave 2 start with letter “B_”.

Data file is in a proprietary format (SPSS .sav format) but it can be opened through “R”, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, using different “R” libraries (such as “foreign”).