Ethnocentrism, Authoritarian Tendencies and Religiosity: Relations on a Sample of Zagreb Students

This paper presents the results of research through which an endeavour was made to establish the predictive importance of various authoritarian tendencies (traditional gender roles, authoritarian obedience, conformism) in relation to expressions of ethnocentrism, whose structure of attitudes indicates nationalistic sentiment. The second objective of the research was to determine the influence of declarative religiosity on the latent configuration of ethnocentrism and the variables of authoritarian tendencies. The research was conducted on a sample of first-year students at the University of Zagreb (N = 223). The homogeneity of the measuring instruments was checked by factor analysis with a varimax rotation, and their reliability was calculated by the Cronbach co-efficient. In further multivariate data processing, factor extracted dimensions were used. The results of regression analysis showed that traditional gender roles (patriarchalism) and conformism are significant predictors of ethnocentrism. The approximately 31% ethnocentrism variance was explained by predictor variables. The results of canonical discrimination analysis showed the considerable influence of declarative religiosity on the latent configuration of ethnocentrism and authoritarian tendencies. The structure of the canonical factor indicates the existence of a pattern of attitudes and values of a higher order, called “social conservatism”. A relatively small percentage of variance (around 12%) in the examined variables set can be attributed to differences in declarative religiosity, which points to the relatively modest significance of religiosity in the forecasting of social conservatism. Although the results of research comply with other researches conducted in Croatia on samples of the general population, the author shows, on the example of Voyvodina, that the interrelations of ethnocentrism, authoritarian tendencies, conformism and religiosity are not uniform in a society with people living in a different cultural heritage and political context