Good news: our proposal had just been selected in the context of the cnrs call for âattacks-researchâ projects launched at the end of 2015. Olivier and Anneâs ambition to conduct a sociological survey could begin. The team was eager to contribute to the understanding of a phenomenon that had hitherto been marginal in France and had now become a social fact. The method and timetable for the survey were immediately set.
The first step was to establish the process: identify the schools where we would be allowed to administer a questionnaire to all the students of the appropriate groups. The Ministre de lâéducation nationale very quickly and usefully supported the implementation of the project. He assembled members of his cabinet, and the Education authority of several académies around our research team to discuss together and validate our selection. Twenty-three schools _ general, technological and vocational _ were selected. We wanted to describe several geographical regions in France, to reach urban, rural and rural-urban areas. We also intended to meet adolescents aged between 14 and 16 years, in order to limit as much as possible the attrition effect related to school dropout once students reach the mandatory school age. We similarly sought to survey young people of all social and cultural backgrounds and all religious denominations, but mainly those from the middle and working classes.
The school heads we met during this preparatory phase were mostly very open and willing to cooperate. During the exchanges we had with them prior to the meeting with the students, they occasionnally signaled their own concerns about the doubts concerning laicity among some youth witnessed inside and outside the school context. As schools directors, they were themselves, desirous of survey data which could help them understand why the people living in the âsensitive urban zonesâ (zus) recently labelled âpriority neighbourhoodsâ, particularly young people, could be so receptive to Islamic fundamentalism or to the siren songs of the far-right. Some regretted that in their once open and cosmopolitan city, situations of identity withdrawal had been developing for some years, and were reinforcing spatial segregation and poverty.
At the request of the school heads, a survey charter was drafted for them to help them respond to the questions that parents would be bound to ask about the subject of our research.
After all the contacts had been made, and agreements about principles and logistics had been approved, we could now plan on starting the survey in the schools by the beginning of the school year in September 2016.
From then on, our work could be entirely devoted to the design of the questionnaire. The team members regularly met over several weeks to define more precisely the contours of the research topic and to formulate the questions to be accordingly asked. At the same time, each team member documented via books, articles, conferences, study days, seminars, broadcasts, documentaries, personal testimonies, in order to circulate knowledge and theories within the team. Thus nourished, from one working session to another collective reflection made it possible to refine the elaboration of the questions _ sometimes giving rise to obvious consensus, sometimes to painful arbitrations. This was intended to respect not only the framework of the future analyses but also quite simply the average time taken to complete the questionnaire so that it could be done within an hourâs lesson in the school. Each word had to be weighed so that the questions could be understood in the desired sense and each possible response had to be anticipated so that the future statistical analysis would be relevant. We also knew that we had to guarantee the anonymity of respondents and their personal data, which is imperative for this type of survey. This would finally be the subject of a systematic verification by the cnrs Data Protection Officer.
A total of eighty-five questions were formulated for the respondents that covered a range of issues: relationships to school and family, feelings of belonging, social norms, forms of commitment â¦
Once this work was completed, we asked the survey company tns-Kantar (hitherto known as sofres) to format the questionnaire so that responses could be scanned. We also sought the services of a research firm, n-clique, to develop a digital version of the questionnaire, so as to allow both online and paper-based recording of data, depending on the computer facilities the schools had available.
Before the end of the 2015â2016 school year, we established a pilot study in three schools in the Paris region and the provinces, with the help of some fellow secondary school teachers who kindly agreed to have our questionnaire completed by their students. This valuable step allowed us to make some carefully considered changes in the wording and arrangement of the questions. This was intended to avoid the pitfall of using words that could too easily be misunderstood or the possibility that the questionnaire might be completed too mechanically by respondents.
During the summer of 2016, tns-Kantar prepared the 4500 paper questionnaires needed for the survey, while n-clique developed the digital handover application, the schedule of visits to the various institutions selected and assembled teams to reinforce ours so as to ensure our simultaneous presence in the various schools.
Between the start of the new school year in September and the autumn holidays of 2016, we visited twenty-three schools in the académies of Lille, Créteil, Aix-Marseilles and Dijon, having set as a the rule that we would not stay more than one day in each school to distribute the questionnaire to all students in the Seconde classes. The least disruption to the normal pace and the least communication between the processes of handing out questionnaires would allow us to collect responses that would be relatively little polluted by the extraordinary nature, in the proper sense of the term, of our visit. This was all the more a concern to us because our questions covered a certain number of sensitive topics.
Entering a school is somewhat like penetrating a new universe. Moving from one institution to another is like going from one world to another. Sometimes there is such a distance between the different buildings that one has the impression of walking along the streets of a small town, while at other times the school seems crammed into itself. The buzzer can be strident in one, and ring pleasantly in another. The colors of one seem warm and cosy and loud and blatant in another. Sometimes the age and beauty of the place surprise and inspire the respect that any venerable institution can elicit. But often, however, the dilapidated or decrepit buildings appear to reflect what many see as the deplorable lack of resources of the state education system. In most cases, the administrative and supervisory teams welcomed us with courtesy, commitment and interest _making their influence and rigor feel with one hand, and their benevolence and vocation as educational leaders with the other. This was combined with humor in some cases, as in a school near Dijon where, in the early morning, the school head wanted us â Parisians supposedly prejudiced against the provinces â to believe that he had been expected to meet us in his office at 6.30am with fresh paté and sausage sandwiches. Elsewhere, we occasionally felt that our presence disturbed the established order a little or that it was badly received, perhaps because it was felt that we had been parachuted in by the hierarchy without there being any real prior consent. In general, around a morning coffee in the teachersâ room or a meal in the canteen at noon, the conversations we had with the staff allowed us in every case to get a good grasp of the context in which we had been placed and to become aware of local concerns and ambient tensions. On several occasions we witnessed both disturbing and illuminating scenes that revealed the everyday environment of students. In one case, young girls wearing veils and long dresses outside school were invited to share a compartment at the school entrance reserved for them to change their clothing so as to remove any signs of their religious affiliation. In another, a group of a dozen young students, well dressed and without a hair out of place stood a few metres from the entrance of the school and barred the path across the width of the pavement and the alleyway along the road distributing leaflets to their juniors, inviting them to join Génération identitaire, a political movement that appeared at the early 2000s after the French State banned the far-right group Unité radicale. On other occasions we were told that the school had just gone through a strike or a disturbance that had involved its students.
We worked in pairs to administer our questionnaire in a variety of locations: from rooms equipped with computers, to large amphitheatres and simple classrooms. After checking that all the students present had provided the required signed parental consent form, the handover of the questionnaires to them began with a few minutes of introduction during which we explained to the students the academic context of our work and our aim of making the opinions of 15-year-olds about society, values, and what can and cannot be done better known. We presented our questionnaire, which we had called the âYouth Values and Citizenship Surveyâ. We reminded them of the statistical nature of our research, and the fact that the sample of which they were a part represented nearly 7,000 students. We emphasized the importance of collecting the whole range of their opinions so that they could be taken into account in our study. We pointed out the necessary sincerity of their answers, on which the reliability of our future results depended. We insisted on the personal and anonymous dimension of the handover which allowed them to provide their thoughts as freely as possible, in the knowledge that no one could ever identify their answers at a personal level. Of course we did not fail to thank them for their participation in this valuable research work, for them consisting of following the order of the question numbers, and ticking each time the answer they had chosen. We asked them to ignore the questions that might possibly embarrass them while encouraging them to answer freely as many questions as possible, and reminding them that there were no right or wrong answers, since only their personal opinions counted. We made ourselves available during the quiet period of the handover in order to help them to understand any particular term and to dispel any doubts they might have had about the wording of the questions.
Although classes wandered off and got themselves lost a couple of times before we were able to get them back with their teachers as previously agreed, in almost all cases the students played the game, if not always enthusiastically, at least with interest. They often asked at the end of the handover what would happen to this survey and whether they could know the results. A few times, however, it was necessary to deal with some individual exhibitions of nonchalance, halfway between showing off and provocation, or even outbursts of annoyance about the questions being asked that some respondents thought were too personal or too complicated. Questions about political positioning in particular were often seen as being the most difficult to answer: to place themselves on a 10-point scale, from the extreme left to the far-right, was not always easy for them. Several times we were able to observe, for example, that after asking us where Marine Le Pen stood, the students ticked box 1. Not in order to expressly signify their adherence to the extreme left but rather as a way of marking their firm opposition to a figure of the extreme right. Last but not least, it was occasionally necessary to help students who had recently arrived in the country throughout the process of completing the questionnaire to help them understand the questions that the language barrier prevented them from grasping at the outset.
At the end of each day spent in the field, gathering all our completed questionnaires, we had the satisfaction of having collected a large amount of data which would be sufficient to generate fruitful analyses. Especially so as during this time spent in schools, and thanks to the financial support of the Fondation Jean Jaurès, we had the OpinionWay polling organization submit the same questionnaire to a panel of young people aged 15â17 from a representative sample of the French population. This component when combined with the survey process would be used to make comparisons between the two samples: that of our students, over-representing the younger descendants of immigrants and Muslims, as well as young people from lower class social groups, would make it possible to take a close-up view of less visible phenomena within the national representative sample.
Our sense of mission accomplished was further strengthened when whispered exchanges with the teachers during the handovers laid the groundwork for the future qualitative phase. Seeing with great interest that their students would have time to express themselves as imminent adult citizens, many of them made themselves available to encourage the debates in their classrooms that we were planning to conduct both to deepen understanding of future statistical results and to explore new areas for questions.
Once the raw data distributions had been produced from the 6,828 completed and useable questionnaires, the team members spent several weeks methodically exploring the data, to cross-tabulate it, to identify the most salient elements, to compare them in terms of the two samples of respondents, to discuss recoding choices and statistical analysis methods, to share their demonstrations on one point or another, to identify more and more precisely the main aspects of the survey. Several meetings about the initial results were organized at the request of the project partners. In March 2017, a press conference held at the headquarters of the cnrs was the first occasion when the initial results of the survey could be made public, as well as the announcement that they would be given deeper context through individual and group interviews with students.
Because during this time the qualitative phase of the survey was being organized with the help of the cnrs and the Ministère de lâEducation nationale, as well as the the Ministère de la Culture, the Institut National de la Jeunesse et de lâEducation Populaire (injep), the Caisse Nationale dâAllocations Familiales (caf), who were all concerned by the issues being explored by the survey in terms of their roles in educational initiatives and public policies. Thanks as well, of course, to the exchanges conducted during the questionnaire with school heads, educational advisors and teachers, we were able to draw up a plan of further field research in several schools already visited, in order to meet some of the students who had completed the questionnaire during the quantitative survey. This with the exception of the académie of Aix-Marseilles where the Education authority from the beginning of the project, had proposed to designate one school in particular for conducting our individual and group interviews with young people. Reinforcing our team once again with staff from the research firm n-clique, we set up a schedule of new visits to five institutions of the same four académies, between the months of February and March 2017.
In order to deepen our future analyses it was indeed necessary to refine some of the results revealed by the raw survey data that seemed quite suprising, to say the least. A quarter of students do not wholly condemn the attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan; 68% of young people say that the media did not tell the whole truth about the attacks in France in 2015; a third think that the death penalty should be restored in France; a third considers that there is only one true religion; 80% think that we cannot make fun of religions; one-third agrees that when religion and science are opposed to each other, it is religion that is right; nearly half of the young people say that they do not feel they are only French; nearly a third say they would be ready to confront the police and the security forces â¦
By using these figures as snapshots of the situation, we wanted to highlight the arguments supporting these particularly divisive responses. The aim was to free up the studentsâ voices without judging them or risking making them feel guilty about the answers they had individually given when completing the questionnaire. We thus had the idea of leading the debates not by questioning the students in more detail about what they had themselves answered, but by fully involving them in a common reflection. By asking them to comment on the initial survey results and to give us their interpretations of them we would be able to involve them in our process of collective understanding. It is therefore in this sense that we designed the interview guide.
For this qualitative research phase, we allotted two days per académie for our visits to the schools. For each session, three classes had been selected at our request by the school heads, with the aim of meeting, once again, students enrolled in Seconde for the three streams: vocational, technological or general.
When we arrived in the school, the management team welcomed us and gave us some more information on how the school worked, the general atmosphere that prevailed, the significant events that might have happened recently ⦠In Lille, an argument between two teenagers had got out of hand the day before our arrival. One had kicked the other with a safety shoe and had broken his nose. Such violence was quite common and was becoming frighteningly almost commonplace. In Marseille, we were asked to be careful in our discussions with the students, to remain consistent with the reminder that was regularly given to them within the institution regarding the strictly private nature of religion. In the académie of Créteil, teachers had been concerned by the absence of a girl from the end of the last school year. With hindsight, there was little doubt in their minds as to what had happened to her: she had increasingly been seen wearing concealing clothing in the school, had gradually become radicalised and had ended up by going away to Syria. It was also known that in a nearby school, a former student, who committed suicide in a jihadist operation a few months earlier, had left the terrifying memory of his image on a class photograph where the camera had fixed him forever standing a little apart from the group, staring gloomily at the lens and forgetting to smile ⦠Thus, the feeling of being permanently perched on a powder keg seemed to haunt many of our supervisory and adult interlocutors.
Then came the moment when we met the students. We formed groups of five to seven young boys and girls chosen at random. We also conducted individual interviews. We conducted our discussions in the rooms reserved for us and asking as agreed for the anonymous opinions of students about the types and percentages of answers collected by our questionnaire.
This approach allowed respondents to express extremely rich and varied ideas. We noted that some of our questions could be interpreted in different ways: âstrong manâ could have been understood as âcompetent manâ. Similarly âthere is only one true religionâ could have been taken as meaning âin fact we all have the same Godâ or âthere are several religions but they all teach the same thingâ, or âit is as if the tree was God, and its branches were the religions,â or even âthere are several but, for me, there is only one that is true.â As for âWe can laugh at everything, even religions,â some students may have considered that we can laugh at religions but however not necessarily at everything else. Or, apart from being born in France and having French nationality, âFeeling Frenchâ could find its limit in the eyes or the word of rejection of others. For example, in Dijon, for a student of Moroccan origin and Muslim faith, âto feel Frenchâ was to be able to âto walk freely in the street without being looked at in a hostile way because my face is not Frenchâ. Nor being insulted because we wear the veil: two or three years ago his mother had been verbally abused by a passer-by. This young man said he no longer felt French at all since this outrageous episode. Not feeling French could also be interpreted as claiming not to be assimilated with the racist French. In addition, the sometimes strong and definitive identity that the cité (housing estate) provides can, according to some young people, have greater relevance than any sense of national belonging. Alternatively the sweet feeling of coming home every time one returns on holiday to the same place since childhood could explain why one can feel as much a French person as someone of foreign origin.
We also observed that the comments made by some students throughout the interview were not necessarily in line with their expressed political opinion. For example, they could have a rather liberal discourse on all the themes, but at the end of the discussion, when we approached the political position, declared themselves in favour of closing the borders, considered to be a top priority that only Marine Le Pen had. On another matter, respect for authority could have been misunderstood: some respondents indeed thought that it was necessary to teach children that the authorities, and especially the police forces, must respect individuals, and especially young people, whom they tend to treat too much âlike dogsâ.
But in the vast majority of cases, it was reassuring to verify that the eighty-five questions in the quantitative phase had been understood as we had wanted them to be.
We also had to keep in mind the political and social context in which this qualitative phase of the study was taking place and which would inevitably influence the nature of the debate: this included the agonizing succession of attacks claimed by Daesh, of course, and also the French presidential election campaign of 2017, with the rise of support for Marine Le Pen in the opinion polls, the âPenelopegateâ affair around the suspicions of fictitious jobs being given to the wife of François Fillon, one of the candidates, or the fall in the popularity of the current French president François Hollande. The students would also have in mind the dramas that had affected young people only slightly older than themselves: the very recent and traumatic Theo case,1 itself resurrecting the memory of the tragedies of Zyed and Bouna2 and Adama Traore,3 painfully rooted in the collective memory.
In all, we carried out twenty individual interviews and thirty-four focus group discussions. After transcription, and then careful replay of the recordings to correct the texts produced, and proofreading of a thousand pages, a single document was drawn up, grouping the essential parts of the statements collected by themes in order to usefully complement our statistical analyses.
As we re-read the document containing the qualitative material thus collected, we noted that the term ârespectâ proved to be a key word : whether in the form of noun, verb, adverb or adjective, it appeared more than four hundred and fifty times in the statements of students and throughout almost all the topics. Whether it is about freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the sacred, individual choice, difference, education, institutions, the police, the commitment of political figures, freedom, equality, fraternity ⦠the young people we questioned overwhelmingly claim that respect is a central value. Moreover, we had recorded in the quantitative survey the fact that 83% of students were in agreement with the idea that âthe most important things that must be taught to children are obedience and respect for authorityâ. However, the qualitative research results highlighted the fact that in their interpretation of this question the words obedience and authority had been largely erased in favour of an isolated emphasis on the word respect.
What students refer to and deplore above all is the lack of mutual respect, applying to most of the topics discussed. Although they do not clearly define the term, it is respect in all its meanings which seems to them to be what is being scorned: the feeling that encourages us to treat someone with respect, the feeling of veneration for the sacred, the sense of reverence for something considered in terms of its moral value, the consideration for a thing without necessarily believing in it or being associated with it, the fact of taking into account the dignity of the human person, the attitude of deference to someone by word or by act, of considering something to be just or good and not to infringe or harm it, to be faithful to something, to conform to moral, social and religious rules, the fear of human judgment, the attitude that leads one to adopt conformist behaviors for fear of shocking, or displeasing others through what we might say. A key word therefore about how we should live together.
This observation among students should probably be put in wider perspective in terms of the existing literature on the concept of respect and could be the starting point for new research questions for subsequent studies to explore.
The students we met expressed obvious pleasure about being able to express themselves freely about the social issues that we were asking them to discuss. And our pleasure and interest in listening to them was very real too. Vincent, Shanez, Soumia, Ryan, Jeremy, Mossem, Shaïma, Juliette, Ines, Kevin and all of the other students entrusted us with both their thoughts and what they have not yet thought about, with confidence. When the discussion starts and a lot of sincere, serious and even amusing words come out of it, and a treasure-trove of spontaneous, brilliant or even sometimes very sombre words are uttered, a certain magic operates. While collecting valuable research material, we have repeatedly been able to experience something that is also deeply rewarding at a personal level. For that, we would like to offer our warmest thanks to all the young people who took part in our survey.
The Théo case refers to the alleged rape of a young black man named Théo by police with a baton in February 2017 in the Paris suburb. (Translatorâs note).
Zyed Benna (17) and Bouna Traoré (15) died in an electricity sub-station after being chased into it by police in Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005. A long and drawn out legal process led to the acquittal of the policemen concerned on the charges of failing to aid a person in danger in 2015. (Translatorâs note).
Adama Traoré (24) died of asphyxiation in Beaumont-sur-Bois in 2016 in what still remain unexplained circumstances after being pursued and apprehended by police, handcuffed and left face-down on the ground. (Translatorâs note).