Values and Attitudes Toward Immigrants Among School Children in Switzerland and Poland

Author(s) : Charlotte Clara Becker, Eldad Davidov, Jan Cieciuch, René Algesheimer, Martin Kindschi

Source : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-022-09357-4

“Research on key determinants of negative attitudes toward immigration has often suggested that values held by individuals systematically explain such sentiments. Universalists appear to have more positive and conservatives more negative attitudes. So far, however, these insights are based on studies using adult samples. In our study, we analyze these relations among children and adolescents. For the analysis, we utilized a Swiss-Polish panel dataset (2015–2017, N = 5,332) with three time points collected among school children aged 8–19 years. We employed autoregressive cross-lagged models. The results indicated that while universalism decreased negative attitudes toward immigrants, the expected effect for conformity-tradition was not found.”

Keywords: Values, Attitudes toward immigration, Panel data, School children, Autoregressive cross-lagged models