CHAPTER 6: Is AIESEC successful in importing tolerance to the Czech Republic?
6.3 Results
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Unfortunately, the data of how many Czech students have been part of AIESEC projects in total is not available and is also very challenging to collect, therefore it is hard to determine whether the number of 781 respondents is representative enough. It is estimated, however, that since 2010 project EDISON itself has reached a couple hundred thousand Czech students. If we follow the example of the Czech Center for Public Opinion (CVVM) which usually uses around 1000 respondents to represent the opinion of around 8 million adults in the Czech Republic, we can say, given the circumstances, that number 781 is enough for the purpose of this thesis.
6.3 Results
Before getting to the results, for most of the questions a scale of 5 options is used:
➢ 1 Stands for Absolutely Disagree
➢ 2 Stands for Disagree
➢ 3 Stands for Neither Disagree nor Agree
➢ 4 Stands for Agree
➢ 5 Stands for Absolutely Agree
Let us now look at how the Czech students feel about AIESEC and its projects. Graph 6.2 provides the answers to a question: “Would you say that AIESEC is an NGO that promotes diversity?” In this sense, it is whether AIESEC does show that there are many different groups of people, different cultures, different mentalities, habits, religions, etc. in the world. Graph 6.3 answers: “Would you say that the group of foreign volunteers in your project was diverse enough?” These two questions are based on the news story accusation that AIESEC mostly brings Muslims and then hires few other nations to make it less suspicious. It is important to keep in mind that if students attend the project SPEAK! they usually only interact with 1
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foreigner, depending on which language they chose to improve (usually German, French, Spanish, Italian and English was offered). Project EDISON usually sends a group of 6-10 EPs to each school. Let us see if students feel that the group was diverse enough, in terms of having different nationalities, representatives of different cultures and religions, etc.
Graph 6.2: Would you say that AIESEC is an NGO that promotes diversity?
(Author)
Looking at Graph 6.2 it is safe to conclude that AIESEC is successful in promoting diversity in the World. Majority of respondents either ‘Agree’ or ‘Absolutely Agree’, together 678 (472+206), which is 86.8%. If we try to break down the 41 (30+11) answers, 5.2 % that do not agree with this statement, there might be a lot of reasons - usually the respondents who attended the project SPEAK! chose this answer. As mentioned before, attendees of this project usually choose the topics they want to discuss, and it can be literally anything, the main purpose is to practice the language skills. Therefore, attendees of this project might never come in contact with topics as religion or diversity or any topics like that. Perhaps they just do not agree with this statement. Graph 6.3 might help to clarify this.
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Graph 6.3: Would you say that the group of foreign volunteers in your project was diverse enough?
(Author)
Again, majority agrees and thinks that the group of foreigners in their project was diverse enough. Together 625, 80 % respondents agree (353+272). Now, the number of respondents that ‘Absolutely Disagree’ is lower than in Graph 2, however the number ‘Disagree’ is higher, making it together 62 (21+41), 7.9 % of respondents. Possible explanations are, again, SPEAK!
project, or a poor distribution of EPs by the local Czech school could also be the case. As mentioned in Chapter 5, it is up to each individual school how it decides to distribute the EPs and which students it allows to attend this project. Or perhaps, the students feel that a group of 6-10 EPs was not diverse enough, either due to a small number of EPs than they would imagine, or perhaps that particular group had too many representatives of for example South East Asia region. Despite that, the majority agrees that the group of EPs was diverse enough. AIESEC always aims to have the group of EPs as diverse as possible. For example, for the EDISON Little project (that is not part of this study) that I, the author, helped to organize we brought 10 EPs. Those were representatives of: New Zealand, Indonesia, 2 from China, Hong Kong, India, Egypt, Colombia, Brazil and the United States. Among this group there were 2 Muslims – one from Egypt, one from China, 1 Jewish from the US, 1 Hindu from India and 2 Christians from New Zealand and Indonesia. All continents, apart from Europe were covered.
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Next question was about the number of EPs in the project. Respondents agree that it was diverse enough, so how many EPs did they actually interact with? The results are in Table 6.5. In case 2 representatives of the same nation were in 1 group of EPs, respondents were instructed to count it as 1 nationality.
Table 6.5: Number of different nationalities respondents interacted with during AIESEC project
Number of
Table 6.5 shows that most of the respondents interacted with 5 different nationalities. That does not mean they only interacted with 5 different EPs. The range is mostly interaction with 4-7 different nationalities. Only 17 respondents interacted with 1 nationality only, however, this number corresponds with the 18 respondents that attended the SPEAK! project.
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Next, Graph 6.4 presents the answers to: “Would you say AIESEC is an NGO that promotes multiculturalism?’. Respondents were provided with the Czech definition of multiculturalism to help them accurately answer this question.
Graph 6.4: Would you say AIESEC is an NGO that promotes Multiculturalism?
(Author)
Similar to the previous Graphs, positive answers significantly prevail. Together 623 (79.8 %) agree, slightly above 70 (9.2 %) neither disagree nor agree and 86 (10 %) disagree. Together with tolerance, multiculturalism is something that AIESEC is trying to promote. Based on the number of people that disagree with this, AIESEC in the Czech Republic should perhaps try to improve this and make sure the message is clearly delivered.
In Graph 6.5, which answers: “Would you say AIESEC is an NGO that promotes tolerance?”, we can see that the number of people that disagree is smaller, together only 44 (5.6 %). On the other hand, 683 (87.5 %) respondents agree. Here we can conclude that AIESEC is successful in promoting tolerance and also in getting this message across to the Czech students.
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Graph 6.5: Would you say AIESEC is an NGO that promotes tolerance?
(Author)
Let us move on to the religion issue. Following questions are also based on the news story and try to find what students think about it. Mr. X argued that AIESEC is an organization that spreads Islamic ideology and tries to Islamize the Czech Republic. Graph 6.6 shows what students think about AIESEC when it comes to religion.
Graph 6.6: Which religion would you say AIESEC intentionally promotes?
(Author)
Majority of respondents believe that AIESEC does not promote any religion, exactly 87.2 %, which is 681 answers. Christianity got 1.4 % (11), Hinduism 2.9 % (23), Judaism 1.2 % (9).
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Islam chose 7.3 % (57) of respondents. No one chose Buddhism or ‘Other’. There are a lot of EPs that come from Christian-majority countries, however this religion is familiar to the Czech students, therefore they might not perceive it as promotion of this religion. Hinduism is perhaps due to a lot of EPs coming from India and other South East Asian countries. Now about Islam, one might argue that 57 respondents is a high number, however it might not necessarily be bad.
It is possible that the news story left a mark and was a factor when respondents were choosing answers. But what also could play a role, is AIESEC trying to elaborate on that and distance itself from this accusation. After that AIESEC did try to emphasize that it does not do Islamic propaganda but also that Islam is not the religion Mr. X describes, thus some respondents might feel that AIESEC that way promotes Islam, though in a good way. Let us look further into it.
Graph 6.7: During the sessions, which religions were you exposed to?
(Author)
Here, respondents were instructed to pick the religion only if the exposure was excessive. ‘None or almost none’ was chosen by 80.3 % (627) of respondents. Christianity 2.9 % (23), Buddhism 1.4 % (11), Hinduism 6.1 % (48), Other 2.4 % (19) and Islam 6.8 % (53). Compared to Graph 6.6, the number of respondents that chose Islam slightly dropped, to be exact, by 4. However, in the case of Graph 6.7, Islam scores similarly to Hinduism, which indicates that Islam is not the only religion that is paid a lot of attention to during the sessions.
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Graph 6.8 will tell us even more. This time it answers: “During the sessions, how much time on average would you say the foreign volunteers spent on talking about their religion or the religion of their country of origin?”.
Graph 6.8: During the sessions, how much time on average would you say the foreign volunteers spent on talking about their religion or the religion of their country of origin?
(Author)
In Graph 6.8 we can see that 41.6 % (325) of respondents chose ‘None or almost none’, 35.5 % (277) chose ’10-20 %’, 14.7 % (115) went for ’21-30 %’, 3.2 % (25) picked ’31-40 %’, the same number applies to ’41-50 %’. Then 1.8 % (14) answered ’70% +’. To explain this graph, EPs do spend time during their sessions introducing their country of origin. Part of this is of course religion, which is something one cannot simply omit. If we count ‘None or almost none’
and ‘10-20 %’ together 77.1 % (602), we can say that only a little attention is paid to religion during sessions. Answer ’21-30 %’ chosen by 14.7 % (115) of respondents should still not be suspicious and considered as normal. If we look closely at the 1.8 % (14), project SPEAK!
plays a major role here. If Czech students choose to speak about religion or any issues related to this topic, EP discusses it with them. There are some respondents that chose rather higher percentage but perhaps Graph 6.9 can help to clarify this.
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In Graph 6.9 we can see answers to a question: “During the project, was there any foreign volunteer that spent suspiciously a lot of time talking about his/her religion?”.
Graph 6.9: During the project, was there any foreign volunteer that spent suspiciously a lot of time talking about his/her religion?
(Author)
Here we see that majority of the respondents, 97.4 %, which is 761 answered ‘No’. The answer
‘Yes’ chose 1.4 % (11) and ‘Yes, more than 1’ chose 1.2 % (9) of respondents. We asked the respondents that chose to answer yes if they could elaborate on that. The answers were quite similar, for example that there was an EP from Thailand that talked about Buddhism a lot and showed many pictures of many temples in cities - Bangkok and Ayutthaya. There was one answer that is worth mentioning and it was that there was an EP from Iran that spent time talking about the religious conflicts of the region. However, it was a single answer.
The last graph referring about religion is Graph 6.10. This graph presents answers to: “Do you feel that the foreign volunteers tried to persuade you to follow any certain religion?”. In Graph 6.10 the answer ‘Absolutely Disagree’ dominates, with 634 (82.3 %) opinions. ‘Agree’ is the second most common answer, but rather small compared to the first option. This means that
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together 710 (90.9 %) respondents believe that there was no EP that tried to persuade them to follow their religion.
Graph 6.10: Do you feel that the foreign volunteers tried to persuade you to follow any certain religion?
(Author)
Together 38 (4.8 %) believe there might have been some form of persuasion. It is hard to determine up to which level this should make AIESEC concerned. It is possible that due to poorer English (or other language) it was misunderstood by students what the EP tried to deliver or vice versa, the EP might have misled the Czech students. This might play a role, because the previous graphs do not indicate that intentional persuasion took place.
Now we move to another argument and it is that AIESEC promotes something that is not true and only describe the world positively and that way suppresses students’ sound judgement.
Graph 6.11 provides answers to: “Do you think that something that is not true was presented to you during the project?”.
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Graph 6.11: Do you think that something that is not true was presented to you during the project?
(Author)
Looking at Graph 6.11, yet again answers in favor of AIESEC prevail. Absolutely disagree and disagree together 637 (81.6 %). Neutral answer chose 104 (13.3 %) respondents, rather a high number. A number of 40 (5.1 %) of respondents believe that something that was presented to them was not true. However, it is nearly impossible to determine what it was and whether what a student sees as ‘not true’ is actually true or not. It can be anything from wrong presentations of numbers (of population or so) to making Islam look like a peaceful religion, which students might not agree with. If we look at previous graphs we must conclude here that the issue of Islam is not the case here, also the number is rather small. The number of neutral answers could be due to students being unable to tell whether what is being presented to them about a certain country is true or not, as their knowledge of that particular country can be limited.
Graph 6.12 focused on the content of presentations. Question: “Do you think that topics that were presented to you are not acceptable?”. The answers show that majority of respondents do not agree with this statement, in fact 699 (89.5 %). The number that agrees is similar to Graph 6.11.
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Graph 6.12: Do you think that topics that were presented to you are not acceptable?
(Author)
Again, this might be a result of different opinions. It is hard to determine where each individual student draws the line between what is and what is not acceptable. If an EP says that in his/her country women were covers, it may be unacceptable to some students, but that does not indicate that it is bad or wrong.
The last graph, Graph 6.13 serves as a feedback to AIESEC and also as a confirmation to the previous results. This graph answers 4 different questions.
➢ Participation stands for: “If you had the chance, would you participate in another AIESEC project?”
➢ Volunteer stands for: “If you had the chance, would you become a volunteer that is sent abroad to talk about the Czech Republic and its culture?”
➢ Member stands for: “If you had the chance, would you become an AIESEC member?”
➢ Recommendation stands for: “Would you recommend AIESEC projects to your friend or your friend’s school?”
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answers prevail, which means that students would indeed like to participate in more AIESEC projects, would recommend these projects to others and perhaps would like to become members of AIESEC or EPs that go abroad and represent the Czech Republic.Looking at all the answers we can say that hypothesis H1 about AIESEC being successful in promoting tolerance is proven right. In all cases, answers in favor of AIESEC significantly prevail. Let us now look at whether AIESEC mitigates the current situation or not. In other words, are these results in line with reality?
Yes Probably
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