CATCH-EyoU: Processes in Youth's Construction of Active EU Citizenship: Cross-national Wave 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.

This work package (WP7) sets out to address open questions concerning factors associated with youth’s active EU citizenship. In particular, assumed (directions of) influences of relevant factors and their joint workings will be examined among adolescents and young adults in various situations of life, across different EU countries representing variations in, e.g., economic situation/crisis, political conditions, and history as an EU member state. This dataset presents the second wave of data collection. WP7 wave 2 data collections have been completed at all eight participating sites in winter 2017/18. The national data sets have been checked and processed including analyses of measurement quality. Finally, a longitudinal cross-national data set has been established which is ready for analyses and available to all Consortium members.

The dataset contains more than 7400 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 collected at other points in historical time as well as in other countries than the eight European ones included. Likewise, stakeholders may be interested in reanalyzing our data particularly with a focus on descriptive survey-type information of European citizenship among youth across Europe. Earlier research on these issues is far more restricted in terms of the substantive scope, namely concerning insights into identity and behavioral aspects of participation on the European level and relevant processes, as well as in terms of the cross-national dimension including a larger number of countries from different European regions.

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.

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

B_Filter_Age1 – selects participants who indicated age between 14-30 or did not indicate age at wave 2

B_Filter_Age2 – selects participants who indicated age between 14-30 at wave 2

Other technical variables refer to participants’ unique identification code (ID), country of data collection (Country), 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).

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”).