ICCS 2009 Technical Report - IEA

Table 12.6: Item parameters for scale reflecting students’ democratic value beliefsDemocraticValuesQuestion/Item Wording Delta Tau(1) Tau(2) Tau(3)There are different views about what a society should be like. We are interested in your views on this.How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements?IS2P20A Everyone should always have the right to express their -2.64 -0.13 -1.34 1.48opinions freelyIS2P20E All people should have their social and political rights respected -2.06 -0.53 -1.06 1.59IS2P20F People should always be free to criticize the government -1.22 -1.70 -0.21 1.90publiclyIS2P20H All citizens should have the right to elect their leaders freely -2.12 -0.76 -0.84 1.61IS2P20I People should be able to protest if they believe a law is unfair -1.78 -1.16 -0.77 1.93Figure 12.5: Confirmatory factor analysis of items measuring students’ democratic valuesIS2P20A0.581.00DEMVAL0.650.680.490.710.61IS2P20EIS2P20FIS2P20H0.540.760.50RMSEA 0.058NNFI 0.91CFI 0.95IS2P20I0.62Students’ perceptions of good citizenshipQuestion 21 of the ICCS student questionnaire contained items relating to being a good adultcitizen. Students were asked to rate the importance (“very important,” “quite important,” “notvery important,” “not important at all”) of a series of possible citizenship behaviors. The twoscales that were derived from this question, and which are included in the student database, are:• Students’ perceptions of the importance of conventional citizenship (CITCON);• Students’ perceptions of the importance of social-movement-related citizenship (CITSOC).The first six of these items were used to construct the scale students’ perceptions of the importanceof conventional citizenship (CITCON). The reliability of this scale (Cronbach’s alpha) was 0.71for the pooled ICCS sample; the cross-national reliabilities ranged from 0.54 to 0.77 (seeTable 12.7). Table 12.8 shows the item wording as well as the item parameters that were usedfor scaling. The higher values on this scale denote stronger degrees of importance placed onconventional citizenship behaviors.Another four items in this question were used to derive the second scale—students’ perceptionsof the importance of social-movement-related citizenship (CITSOC). Higher values on this scalecorrespond to greater perceived importance of social-movement-related citizenship. The scalehad a reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) of 0.74 for the pooled ICCS sample, while the countryreliabilities ranged from 0.51 to 0.81 (see Table 12.7). The item parameters that were used forscaling are shown in Table 12.8.174ICCS 2009 technical report