Date of Award

2005-05-01

Degree Name

EdD Doctor of Education

Dissertation Committee

Fred J. Galloway, EdD, Chair; Mary Woods Scherr, PhD, Member; Clara H. Eder, EdD, Member

Keywords

California, demographic determinants, global citizenship, graduate student population, higher education, institutional determinants, Leadership studies

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, the explosive growth in information technologies, combined with the globalization and easy access to other cultures, has allowed people to think of themselves more as citizens of the world than of a particular nation. Although the notion of “global citizenship” is often discussed in the popular press, little scholarly attention has been devoted to its measurement. Less attention has been paid to the role higher education plays in creating global citizens. To address these problems, a survey instrument was created to measure three facets of global citizenship: environmentalism, social justice, and civic responsibility, and was administered to 217 graduate students at two California universities. Two analytic techniques were applied to the data -- factor analysis to construct indices for each of the facets as well as for the overall construct, and regression analysis to decompose the variation in global citizenship scores into both demographic and institutional components. The results of the study suggest that significant variation exists regarding the level of global citizenship among the participants, with scores ranging from 32 to 59 on the (60 point) global citizenship scale. More importantly, this variation extended to file three facets of global citizenship, and when regression analysis was used to identify the determinants of each component, both demographic and institutional variables were found to be predictors of global citizenship. Specifically, higher levels of global citizenship were found to occur among older individuals, those fluent in more than one language, those with strong feelings regarding the sustainability of our planet's resources, and those individuals that attended undergraduate institutions with large percentages of minority students. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that although both institutional and demographic variables were significant predictors of global citizenship, when broken down into the individual facets, institutionally manipulated variables explained more of the variation than did demographic variables. As such, institutions and researchers are encouraged to use this newly created measure of global citizenship to both measure the extent of global citizenship among students and to determine the extent to which the findings of this study are generalizable.

Document Type

Dissertation: Open Access

Department

Education

Download

Share

COinS