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jkldotio | 9 years ago

The full results in the report seem to me be somewhat more complex to interpret than the summary, or the original submission title, suggest. On the first question (Q18jt), a 4 point scale without a "don't know" neutral option, there are large numbers of people putting global citizenship before national citizenship (51%-49%). However, when you get to a later question (M2), that asks people what their most important identity is, national citizenship overtakes global citizenship overwhelmingly (52% national, 17% global, 11% local, 9% religious and 8% race/culture). National citizenship is the largest in all countries besides three, and it's the second largest in two of those. When given a variety of choices in M2 the level of people supporting global citizenship (17%) as a primary identity is even lower than even those who "strongly agree" to global citizenship being more important to national citizenship in first question (22%).

In M2 it seems all of the "somewhat agree" and a few points of the "strongly agree" have gone elsewhere including back to national citizenship which creates a tension between the results of the two questions. It’s quite stark in the case of India where in the first question 67% place global citizenship over national citizenship but in M2 51% have national citizenship as their primary identity and only 6% have global citizenship.

I think the first question (Q18jt) would be more interesting if it was a 5 point scale with a "don't know" option provided rather than trying to railroad people into an answer with a 4 point scale. Even then I think the M2 question is a better instrument as it provides a clear set of choices. For example Pakistan goes from 56% global in the first question to 2% global in the second. Most of those seem to move to religion as their primary identity (43% answer religion on M2). Many religions are globally oriented toward all humanity but the M2 question lets us see more clearly what they believe.

Even though the second question (M2) is better it probably could still do with some examination. For example the only country where global citizenship was higher than national citizenship in M2 was Spain, but was that because many people in Catalonia and the Basque Country are choosing global over "Spanish" because the "local" option was translated in a particular way? If they used a word closer to "neighborhood" you could see how that might happen. Similarly was "local" translated more broadly in the Indonesian translation and became the dominant answer there (56%) as people could identify with an island/state/ethnic/linguistic group that was "local", like Bali for example. It's hard to tell without all the data and the exact translations of the questions.

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