Children's knowledge, beliefs and feelings about people who belong to different national and state groups

The book, in addition to a broad review of the literature on children’s knowledge, beliefs and feelings about nations and national groups, presents the findings from two cross-national comparative research projects, which have been conducted by the collective authorships of the book. The projects involved 4211children aged 6, 9, 12, and 15 years, living in a number of different European countries (included Italy), who were all individually interviewed. This chapter focuses on the findings on children’s representations of, and attitudes to, national and state in-groups and out-groups. A major conclusion to emerge from these data is that there is a very considerable variability in the development of children’s national and state attitudes as a function of the specific national and state context in which they live.