Czech students and EU - knowledge and views[Čeští studenti a EU - znalosti a názory]

The paper deals with the results of a pilot study themed "Czech students and EU", which adumbrated a prepared extensive research in graduation years of secondary schools of the region Vysočina on the occasion of the Czech chairmanship in the European Union in the first half-year of 2009. The pilot study included 362 students of the Polytechnic College in Jihlava. Its objective consisted particularly in the rectification of a questionnaire and exploratory research into relationships between the knowledge and opinion parts of questionnaires even within the both mentioned parts by means of factor analysis and methods of structural modelling. With respect to the considerable number of respondents and standard conditions, which were ensured at completing the questionnaires it is not possible to ignore even results concerning the knowledge and views of the group of respondents as a whole as well as particular specific segments. Our research was inspired by a "Eurobarometer", but with respect to a fact that (unlike the Standard Eurobarometer) it refers to a specific target group, ie studying young people, it concerns only partly and only in some questions comparable examination. Therefore, the questionnaire (in contrast to Eurobarometer) involves also the knowledge part. This part includes eight fields. With respect to the study orientation of the respondents surprisingly worse results occur particularly in fields Institution, politics and law of EU (30% successfulness) and Economy and finance of EU (37% successfulness). On the contrary, the highest successfulness (of course, only relatively) was noted in fields Culture, education and sport in EU (63%). Generally, knowledge of students can be unambiguously evaluated as poor. The opinion part includes in total 20 items, which are divided into five fields. In particular respondents, sex, the size of the place of residence, political profile, social group of a household, ideas of a future carrier, knowledge of languages and interest in problems of EU were determined by means of identification questions. As for the opinion part, it is possible to state that opinions of students are not too marked (answers in the central part of an evaluation scale predominate but, at the same time, all values of the scale were used in all questions) and differences between segments of respondents are generally insignificant. The subject of the paper is particularly aimed at the analysis of results of the opinion part, in the concrete eight items from two fields (Social dimension of EU and Me and EU). For the first area, segments were compared according to sex and political orientation and for the second area, according to sex, language knowledge and interest in EU problems.