Development of a Scale Measuring Student’s Hybridized Cultural Identities in ICCS 2016

Civic and citizenship education is about teaching students to make decisions, take responsibility for society and engage in politics (Geboers et al. 2015). Intending to increase students’ political participation across nations, based on mutual respect and human rights, the subject is highly addressed in the European framework (Eurydice 2012, Abs & Werth 2013). On the global level the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016) currently examines how youth in different states are prepared to become good citizens for democracy (Kerr et al. 2010). However, what about students with migration backgrounds? How will they become active citizens in their host country? When it comes to the integration discourse in schools, studies reveal that students with migration background often suffer from stereotype threat in school (Weber, Appel, Kronberger 2015). Negative teacher beliefs, student discrimination and inadequate supportive systems challenge students in their identity development and, as a result, may discourage them to become actively engaged in society. Often in research, and also in ICCS 2016, the concept of acculturation is applied to examine students’ intercultural processing strategies based on the four categories integration, separation, assimilation and marginalization (Berry 1997, Birman & Simon 2014, Edele et al. 2013, Jasper 2013). According to Berry, individuals turn to one of the four different acculturation strategies, depending on how one values the own culture (cultural maintenance) and how one values the foreign culture (contact and participation). However, with regard to the expected impact of globalization and the role of socioeconomic influence, recent research suggests that adolescents rather prefer to maintain a degree of flexibility in their hybridized identity development (Fuligni & Tsai 2015, Kang & Bodenhausen 2015). Thus, when looking at school as a moderator of specific outcomes, it becomes even more important to explore patterns of adolescent’s identity development in conjunction with their autonomy development. Therefore, in this study it will be examined, how the assessment of students’ cultural identity is part of ICCS 2009, how this assessment was elaborated as part of a national option for ICCS 2016 and how it may be extended to the exploration of students’ patterns of hybridized cultural identity towards active citizenship in future. In ICCS 2009 cultural identity is captured on the base of different proxy measures (Geboers et al. 2015), while in ICCS 2016 two scales ask students about their attitude towards their regional, national and European sense of belonging and the importance of cultural belonging. Item-Response-Theory (IRT) (Baker 2000) will be applied to the scaling of cultural identity in ICCS 2009 and 2016 to evaluate whether the individual items meet the conditions. In addition, based on the Rasch model (Moosbrugger & Kelava 2012), item requirements for the characteristic value of cultural identity are defined. Both scaling of cultural identity are analyzed in the context of the respective ICCS and a new scale for the measurement of students’ cultural hybridized identity is developed, taking into account the interrelationship between identity and autonomy development (Kang & Bodenhausen 1995).