Stavovi studenata prema tražiteljima azila u Republici Hrvatskoj
Student Attitudes towards Asylum Seekers in Croatia

Summary/Abstract: This paper describes the construction of "The Scale of Attitudes towards Asylum Seekers" based on a survey conducted on a convenience sample of 277 students of social, natural and engineering studies within the University of Zagreb. Applied exploratory factor analysis, using the direct oblimin rotation, resulted in three factors: "perception of social threat"; "perception of cultural threat"; and "perception of health and economic threat". The obtained factors explain 60.8% of the instrument’s variance and were used as foundation for the construction of additive subscales, which were in further ANOVA analyses treated as the dependent variables. The independent variables used were selected socio-demographic, socio-cultural and contextual variables. The results indicate that a greater perception of asylum seekers as a social and cultural threat is expressed by male students, who study engineering sciences, are politically positioned right and extremely right, are convinced believers or religious, and do not have, or have only one friend who is a foreigner in Croatia (significant only for perception of social threat). On the other hand, a greater perception of the asylum seekers as a health and economic threat is expressed only by students who study engineering or natural sciences. The expected correlations between the attitudes towards asylum seekers and the variables "personal experience of displacement" (including refugee experience), "contact with asylum seekers and asylees" and "primary source of information on asylum" were not statistically significant.

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