Globalization versus Localization: A Comparative Global Analysis of the Attitudes of University Students

This thesis aims to measure and compare the attitudes of university students at three different public universities (The University of Central Florida, The Udmurt State University, and The Middle East Technical University) in three very distinct countries (The United States, Russia, and Turkey, respectively) with the hope of understanding their opinions toward the cultural ramifications resulting from the globalization process. The hypothesis is that the higher the exposure and receptivity of university students to cultures different from their own, via cosmopolitizing variables, i.e. study abroad. foreign television, music, or food, the more likely they would be to accept the concepts surrounding globalization and reject those of localization, whether expressly aware of the concepts or no thereby more likely they will be to rank strongly globalist., on a determined dimension of globalism. An anonymous survey was translated and disseminated to students at each of the three universities referenced above in order to gather a representative sample that could potentially be studied as a microcosm of each country\u27s university student population as a whole. The data garnered was then put through a series of statistical analyses, using SPSS, in order to understand the correlations between variables and to analyze their statistical significance. While there is existing literature discussing the attitudes and opinions of adults towards the concept of globalization there is a dearth of research and information collected on the views and attitudes of the very influential university-age population. This thesis seeks to fill in the informational gap and provide a framework for further continuation of this study