CATCH-EyoU: Processes in Youth's Construction of Active EU Citizenship: Cross-national Wave 1 Questionnaires: Italy, Sweden, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic, UK, and Estonia

Abstract

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 first wave of data collection. All teams collected data from a quite diverse sample of young people from their respective country.

We achieved the targeted sample sizes due to our improved recruitment strategies (based on our experiences from the pilot assessment). More precisely, we could attract more than 10,400 young people to participate in our study (concrete numbers depend on sample selection). Since we initially set out to reach at least 6,400 young people, we were quite successful in our recruitment. Paper-and pencil as well as online modes of assessment proved to be equally effective.

The data set integrates data resulting from the first submission wave (wave 1) of Catch-EyoU Questionnaire. The questionnaire was submitted to adolescents and young adults from Italy, Sweden, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic, UK, and Estonia.

Catch-EyoU Questionnaire was focused on attitudinal, identity, and behavioral aspects of European citizenship, on youth engagement and participation on the regional and national levels as well as on fostering and limiting conditions affecting these. Earlier research is far more restricted in terms of insights into identity and behavioral aspects of participation on the European level and relevant processes, as well as in terms of cross-national comparisons based on a substantial number of countries from different European regions.

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.

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:

A_Filter_Age1 – selects participants who indicated age between 14-30 or did not indicate age at wave 1

A_Filter_Age2 – selects participants who indicated age between 14-30 at wave 1

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”).