What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Appendix 2: Attitudinal scales used in the survey
Attitudes towards neighbourhood
diversity
This scale was also used in the 2009 ICCS, though
it was used with the Latin American sample (Schulz
et al. 2011), not the European sample. The scale
comprises a list of nine different groups of people,
and students were asked to indicate how they
would react to having each of these groups as their
neighbours. Groups included ‘People with a different
skin colour than yours’ and ‘People with mental
health problems’. In the version used by the ICCS,
three response options were used: ‘I would like it’, ‘I
wouldn’t care’ and ‘I would dislike it’.
For our study, this was amended to a
dichotomised scale where 0 = ‘I wouldn’t mind’ and
1 = ‘I would dislike it’ (survey question 16). This also
resonates with the findings of the ICCS Latin America
Report (Schulz et al. 2011), where students who
indicated either ‘liking’ the groups as neighbours
or ‘not caring’ were deemed to be ‘unconcerned’
(that is, neutral), thus exhibiting acceptance of
neighbourhood diversity. For our study a total
score was calculated so that the higher a student’s
score the more groups they said they would not
want as neighbours (and so the less accepting of
neighbourhood diversity they were).