Northern Youth under the Siege of Educational Policy Change: Comparing youth's educational opinions in Finland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Australia

The question posed in this article is how differences between the five countries in the organisation of social policy and education are related to the educational opinions of the youth. In short, what we are dealing with here is how and to what extent social structures, ideologies and norms are transmitted to the level of attitudes. The theoretical framework used in the analysis is the welfare state typology by Esping-Andersen. Practically identical data sets were gathered approximately simultaneously in Australia, Finland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, during January and February 2000. The youths were 15-16 years of age, in the last grade of obligatory education. For the piece of research introduced in this article, five variables and three background variables were chosen. The final pooled data file had 3008 cases (Finland 567, Sweden 413, Spain 788, Portugal 605 and Australia 635). Generally the educational opinions of the youth differed quite clearly along the lines of welfare state regime, although not in every case in the way expected. As the representative of the liberal welfare state mode, Australia clearly differed from the rest of the countries, especially concerning the competitiveness of pupils.