Introduction
Purpose
The purposes of this project are to:
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Develop policy tools that will provide reliable and valid data relating to young people・s attitudes to citizenship and national identity.
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Provide pre-handover baseline measures of young people・s attitudes to citizenship and national identity.
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Measure young people・s attitudes to citizenship and national identity ten years after the handover and benchmark them against the baselines
Key issues
The approach of the tenth anniversary of Hong Kong・s return to China is an important time to consider the state of citizenship understanding of a generation of students who have been schooled in the post-handover context. The issue of citizenship education has featured prominently in the educational reforms for basic education and also as part of the proposed reforms to senior secondary education. Despite the prominence of citizenship education both in schools and in the community, there is little evidence to indicate how successful attempts have been to promote an active citizenship on the part of young people in the new political context of Hong Kong. The current study proposes to address this issue.
Problem to be addressed
The 2004 Biennial Opinion Survey on Civic Education (Committee on the Promotion of Civic Education, 2004) identified a trend amongst 15-19 year olds indicating that this age group had the lowest scores when it came to national identity and on attitudes the Mainland. The survey was not intended to sample a school age population and therefore it is not possible to differentiate between the views of 15 year olds and 19 year olds in this survey. Yet if there is to be a better understanding of needs of citizenship education for this group of young people, more needs to be known about their specific characteristics. What is more given the somewhat narrow focus of the 2004 survey, more needs to be known about other dimensions of citizenship understanding such as levels of trust in government, attitudes towards the media, attitudes towards active engagement in civil society as well as national identity issues. In addition, more sophisticated statistical techniques are needed to show how these variables relate to one another both for younger and older student populations and how they have changed over time.
Outcomes
This project will produce:
1. Baseline measures of Hong Kong students・ attitudes to a range of citizenship issues and international benchmarks to place these baselines in a broader context.
2. Results from a replication of the original study supplemented by additional questions on national identity
3. Measures for comparison with the baseline ten years after the original surveys.
4. Recommendations about the future of citizenship education based on the empirical results of the study.