Martyn Barrett

• MA (Cantab.), DPhil (Sussex), CPsychol, FBPsS, FRSA, FAcSS
• Professor Emeritus at University of Surrey

As outlined by the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC), civic competences are core elements for active participation in a democratic society. This study aimed to examine the linkages between four civic competences (empathy, respect, responsibility, and cooperation) and civic engagement (attitudes an...

This study investigated how Italian emerging adults coped during COVID-19 from a Positive Youth Development framework. Five hundred sixty-five 18- to 29-year-olds completed surveys measuring personal (cognitive reappraisal, optimism), ecological (support and emotional connection with community) assets, and adaptation outcomes (anxiety and future so...

Support for children's rights is greater among children raised in democratic environments. The present two studies examined children's endorsements and predictors of children's rights. Five democratic competences taken from the Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture served as predictors. We tested the models i...

The COVID‐19 pandemic may be considered a unique mass‐trauma experience. This study examined the relations between Italian late adolescents' emotion regulation strategies, their anxiety states, and their experience of the lockdown (in terms of discomfort related to restrictions, capacities to create new functional daily routines, and to find positi...

This short paper briefly summarises some of the social, demographic and macro factors that have been found to impact on youth civic and political engagement. However, it argues that these factors are only potential sources of influence, with the crucial factors that determine whether or not they actually have an effect being the psychological chara...

This chapter focuses on how developing plurilingual, intercultural, and democratic competences, when viewed from the perspective of quality and equity in education, requires the use of responsible and ethical ways to assess such competences. The chapter begins by outlining some of the key principles of assessment that need to be followed to ensure...

This pilot study is the first to examine whether a novel curriculum based on the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) could increase children’s endorsement and knowledge of children’s rights. We conducted a pre-test-post-test design with an intervention and a comparison school. Pupils (n = 172) from Bulgaria, Italy, Nor...

This paper outlines how human dignity, respect, human rights and cultural diversity are interlinked. It is argued that all human beings have intrinsic dignity, and are deserving of respect and respectful behaviour which acknowledges, affirms and protects their autonomy and right to live a life which they choose for themselves, while simultaneously...

Over the past 25 years, the intercultural communicative competence model developed by Michael Byram (1997) has proved to be one of the most influential models, especially in the field of foreign language educa¬tion. This model describes the elements of intercultural communicative competence that Byram judges to be teachable and assessable in the la...

The Positive Youth Development (PYD) model suggests that when individual resources are aligned with growth-promoting ecological resources (i.e., developmental assets), positive development can be observed in youth. Considering this model within the perspective of ecological development systems, this process could be even more relevant when the refe...

Over the past 25 years, the intercultural communicative competence model developed by Michael Byram (1997) has proved to be one of the most influential models, especially in the field of foreign language education. This model describes the elements of intercultural communicative competence that Byram judges to be teachable and assessable in the lan...

This book presents an updated and revised edition of the Council of Europe’s Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters through Visual Media (AIEVM). The AIEVM is an educational tool that has been designed to support learners to think about and to learn from intercultural encounters that they have experienced through visual media such as television,...

This book presents an updated and revised edition of the Council of Europe’s Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters through the Internet (AIETI). The AIETI is an educational tool that has been designed to support learners to think about and to learn from intercultural encounters that they have experienced through the Internet. It is intended to...

This book presents an updated and revised edition of the Council of Europe’s Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters (AIE). The AIE is an educational tool that has been designed to support learners to think about and to learn from face-to-face intercultural encounters that they have experienced. It is intended to support and encourage the develop...

The Council of Europe’s Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters is a set of resources designed to encourage people to think about and learn from intercultural encounters they have had either face-to-face, through visual media such as television, magazines, photographs, films, or through the Internet. There are three separate but parallel tools: (...

This study investigated the relations of emerging adults' personal (civic competence and interdependent self‐construal) and community‐based (sense of community and civic engagement) resources as predictors of appraisal of COVID‐19 Public Health Emergency Management (PHEM) and attitudes toward preventing contagion in Italy. Participants were 2873 It...

The Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture offers a systematic approach to designing the teaching, learning and assessment of competences for democratic culture. It specifies a set of 20 competences which learners need to acquire in order to function effectively as democratic citizens in culturally diverse soc...

The promotion of citizen's democratic and intercultural competence is one of the main actions that European societies may take against some of the most significant challenges they are facing nowadays. The paper is aimed at briefly describing the Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture, some actions that can be...

The Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture offers a systematic approach to designing the teaching, learning and assessment of competences for democratic culture. It specifies a set of 20 competences which learners need to acquire in order to function effectively as democratic citizens in culturally diverse soc...

This paper summarises some of the main findings in the PISA 2018 Global Competence Report that are relevant to intercultural education. It is argued that the international comparisons contained in the report are largely uninterpretable. Instead, it is recommended that readers pay most attention to the patterns of associations between variables whic...

This paper provides an overview of the 20 citizenship competences that are specified by the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (Barrett et al., 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). The procedure that was used to identify these 20 competences is described, and some of the notable characteristics of the set of 20 competenc...

This portfolio is intended for use in conjunction with the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC). It requires learners to compile documents – such as recordings, texts and images – which demonstrate how they are using their competences for democratic culture in diverse situations within and beyond sch...

This portfolio is intended for use in conjunction with the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC). It requires learners to compile documents – such as recordings, texts and images – which demonstrate how they are using their competences for democratic culture in diverse situations within and beyond sch...

This paper provides an overview of the OECD PISA Global Competence conceptual framework, the assessments that were made of global competence in the 2018 round of PISA, and some key findings that were obtained concerning the global competence of 15-year-old students in 66 countries. It was found that merely including global and intercultural issues...

In a recent paper, Simpson and Dervin (2019a) offer a radical critique of the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC). However, Simpson and Dervin’s paper contains numerous factual errors, interpretative errors and category errors in its description of the RFCDC. We identify 12 such errors which invalid...

The Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) was published in April 2018, and is currently being implemented in a number of Council of Europe member states. The RFCDC consists of three main components: a conceptual model of the competences that learners need to acquire in order to respond appropriately a...

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the research that has been conducted into youth civic and political engagement. It draws on findings that have been obtained across a range of social science disciplines, including Psychology, Sociology, Political Science and Education. The book describes the numerous forms that youth engagement can ta...

This chapter focuses on the social and demographic factors that are linked to young people’s civic and political engagement. The chapter begins by discussing the social factors that are the closest to the developing individual, including both the family and the peer group, then moves outwards towards intermediate level social factors such as the ne...

Many psychological factors are related to young people’s civic and political engagement. These psychological factors are often better predictors of different types of civic and political activity than either social or demographic factors. They have also been found to mediate the relationship between macro, demographic and social factors and civic a...

This chapter explores the macro factors that are linked to youth civic and political engagement. By macro factors, we mean the large-scale factors that together define the broader societal and institutional context within which an individual lives. These factors include historical, cultural, economic, political, legal, policy and technological fact...

This book provides an introduction to youth civic and political engagement. It describes the forms that such engagement takes, how it develops, the factors that facilitate or inhibit its development, and the actions that can be taken to promote and encourage the civic and political engagement of youth and empower them as active democratic citizens....

This chapter explores the psychological factors that are linked to young people’s civic and political engagement. These psychological factors are often better predictors of different types of civic and political activity than either social or demographic factors. They have also been found to mediate the relationship between macro, demographic and s...

This chapter explores the social and demographic factors that are linked to young people’s civic and political engagement. The chapter begins by discussing the social factors that are the closest to the developing individual, including both the family and the peer group, then moves outwards towards intermediate level social factors such as the neig...

This chapter explores the macro factors that are linked to young people’s civic and political engagement. These include: the broad patterns of political and civic engagement that occur among adults within a country; the historical, cultural, economic, institutional and legal characteristics of a country; public policies on young people’s active cit...

This chapter provides a guide to many of the concepts that are used in the study of youth civic and political engagement. It also outlines the various forms that youth civic and political engagement can take, summarises the principal findings that have emerged from recent studies into youth engagement, and discusses the numerous psychological, soci...

The Council of Europe promotes and protects human rights, democracy and the rule of law. These principles have been cornerstones of European societies and political systems for decades, yet they need to be maintained and fostered, not least in times of economic and political crisis. Most people would agree that democracy means a form of governance...

The Council of Europe promotes and protects human rights, democracy and the rule of law. These principles have been cornerstones of European societies and political systems for decades, yet they need to be maintained and fostered, not least in times of economic and political crisis. Most people would agree that democracy means a form of governance...

Volume 3 of the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture offers guidance on how the competences might be used in six education contexts. The Framework itself comprises three volumes and is offered as an instrument to help inspire individual approaches to teaching competences for democratic culture while adhering...

The Council of Europe promotes and protects human rights, democracy and the rule of law. These principles have been cornerstones of European societies and political systems for decades, yet they need to be maintained and fostered, not least in times of economic and political crisis. Most people would agree that democracy means a form of governance...

This paper reviews existing evidence on how the intercultural competence of young people can be promoted by schools. It begins by examining the concept of intercultural competence, and the values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and understanding that together comprise this competence. The various actions that can be taken by schools to promote the i...

Global competence is the capacity to examine local, global and intercultural issues, to understand and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others, to engage in open, appropriate and effective interactions with people from different cultures, and to act for collective well-being and sustainable development. This paper presents the concept...

This article presents an overview of current understandings in the study of political and civic engagement and participation, drawing in particular on innovations which have emerged from the Processes Influencing Democratic Ownership and Participation (PIDOP) project. For the purposes of the article, ‘engagement’ is defined as having an interest in...

This study investigated whether demographic variables, efficacy beliefs, visions, and worries are associated with four different forms of (dis)engagement with the European Union (EU): intended voting in the 2019 EU elections, nonconventional political engagement, psychological engagement, and the wish that one’s own country should leave the EU. The...

This paper reviews the research that has been conducted into youth civic and political engagement since 2010. We begin by noting the claim that youth are not sufficiently engaged either civically or politically. We argue that this claim is probably incorrect: rather than using conventional forms of political participation, youth today are often eng...

This document is a product of a Council of Europe project which is taking place in four phases from 2014-17. The first phase has been devoted to the development of a conceptual model of the competences which citizens require to participate effectively in a culture of democracy. This document describes the model and the methods that were used to dev...

Immigration has been undoubtedly one of the most important phenomena of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, despite its significance for both the host countries and the countries of origin, the interest of psychology and, more specifically, of social psychology in immigration is relatively recent, and it has primarily focused o...

This paper discusses issues which are central to the lives of ethnic minority children and youth who are growing up in culturally diverse settings today. Within the discipline of psychology, the dominant theoretical approach that has been used to address these issues is the fourfold model of acculturation as developed by Berry and his colleagues (e...

This article presents an overview of current understandings in the study of political and civic engagement and participation, drawing in particular on innovations which have emerged from the Processes Influencing Democratic Ownership and Participation (PIDOP) project. For the purposes of the article, ‘engagement’ is defined as having an interest in...

This article provides a brief overview of Ed Cairns’ (1945–2012) personal and professional life. Born, raised, and educated in Belfast, Ed’s career at the University of Ulster spanned the years of Northern Ireland’s contemporary political violence—from the riots of the early 1970s, through the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and into the present pos...

En este artículo, se revisa la investigación llevada a cabo en el campo de la psicología evolutiva en el desarrollo del sentido subjetivo de la identidad nacional en niñoslas y adolescentes. A lo largo del artículo se ilustra cómo recientes estudios han cuestionado el tradicional enfoque piagetiano según el cual las actitudes hacia los otros grupos...

This text argues for the full integration of intercultural competence as a core element within the education system. It offers an educational rationale and conceptual framework for the development of intercultural competence, a clear description of its constitutive elements to be developed in and through education, and an overview of a variety of p...

This chapter focuses on civic and political participation among youth, primarily in Europe although the review also draws on evidence from non-European countries in areas where European research is limited. Political science and political sociology only started to show an interest in youth participation in the post-Cold War era due to the emergence...

Culturally responsive teacher, Intercultural competence, teacher education handbook for continued professional development (CPD), diversity education, democracy and human rights education

This book examines the relationship between two policy approaches for managing the cultural diversity of contemporary societies: interculturalism and multiculturalism. The relationship between these two approaches has been a matter of intense debate in recent years. Some commentators argue that they represent two very different approaches, while ot...

In this paper, I review research which has been conducted within the field of developmental psychology into the development of subjective sense of national identity in childhood and adolescence. As we will see in the course of the paper, the traditional Piagetian picture, which depicts children's intergroup attitudes as developing through a sequenc...

The existing literature on political and civic participation has tended to neglect individuals’ judgements about the effectiveness of specific forms of participation, focusing instead on the role of internal, external and collective efficacy in driving levels of participation. The present study examined young people’s judgements of the effectivenes...

Following Turiel's (1983) proposal of two distinct conceptual domains of social thinking, the moral and the social-conventional, research has revealed that children acquire competent rule-differentiation abilities at a very early age within the family context (Smetana & Braeges, 1990; Smetana, Schlagman & Adams, 1993). This study investigated child...

Children tend to use certain drawing strategies differentially when asked to draw topics with positive and negative emotional characterisations. These effects have however only been established when children are asked to use standard drawing materials. The present study was designed to investigate whether the above pattern of children’s response wh...

Various distinctions which have been applied to the development of children's drawings are considered critically, and a distinction between symbolism and intellectual realism is suggested. Drawings made by 42 5- to 7-year-old children of familiar objects with distinctive characteristics were examined. Results provided support for the suggested symb...

This paper reports a study which examined children's understanding of the primary school as a microscopic society, investigating their acquisition of system concepts such as rules, community, self/system interaction and power, and their comprehension of the interrelationships. A sample of 144 children, aged 5–11 years old, from four schools, respon...

A state-of-the-art review of the research in this area, this collection covers children's understanding of family, school, economics, race, politics and gender roles. Recent changes and trends in research are summarised. This is explained in terms of a progression from the Piagetian stages model of development to the current emphasis on socially-me...

This study investigated national identifications and national attitudes among White English children aged 6–7 and 10–11 years old. Eighty children were interviewed using a scale to measure their strength of national identification, and using a trait attribution task and affect questions to measure their attitudes towards four target groups: English...

In this short introduction, the background, rationale, and hypotheses are presented for the studies that are reported in the special issue, as well as the order in which the studies are presented.

This paper reviews some of the relevant background findings against which the empirical studies reported in this special issue were designed. Particular attention is given to previous findings on the development of children's national knowledge, national attitudes and national identifications. The paper also reviews five existing theories, which ha...

This paper discusses national and ethnic identities and differences as they currently exist in the world today. The perspective adopted is that of the social sciences in general and psychology in particular. The main focus is on how social and psychological processes shape people’s identities and perceptions of difference, and how people’s national...

This study assessed children's graphic flexibility and their ability to report on their use of drawing strategies when drawing characterized figures. 253 children (129 boys, 124 girls) aged between 4 years 3 months and 11 year 10 months formed three groups, either drawing a man, a dog or a tree. Each group was asked to draw three emotionally contra...

This paper reports two studies that investigated children's conceptions of mental illness using a naïve theory approach, drawing upon a conceptual framework for analysing illness representations which distinguishes between the identity, causes, consequences, curability, and timeline of an illness. The studies utilized semi-structured interviewing a...

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This study explored what it means to be British from the perspective of young British Indian and Pakistani adults. Fifteen respondents were interviewed using a semi-structured schedule in order to explore their self-descriptions and self-categorizations, how different contexts influence their identifications as British and as Indian/Pakistani, thei...

This study aimed to investigate children's thinking about mental illness by employing a well-established framework of adult illness understanding. The study adopted a semistructured interview technique and a card selection task to assess children's responses to causes, consequences, timeline and curability of the different types of mental illness....

An increasing amount of research explores how children distinguish different aspects of ethnic group attitudes. However, little work has focused on how these aspects tie in with other social and psychological processes. In the present study, 112 black and white children aged 5-, 7- and 9-years completed tests of implicit and explicit ethnic group a...

This is a very impressive monograph bearing every prospect of becoming a landmark in its field. It combines an exceptionally scholarly review of the historical and current literature on children and national identity with an account of the findings of a unique and ambitious series of multi-context, international studies. The results are fascinating...

This book provides a state-of-the-art account of how people's understanding of, and attitudes towards, nations and national groups develop through the course of childhood and adolescence. It offers a comprehensive review of the research which has been conducted into: (1) children's understanding of nations and states as geographical territories and...

This report examines possible causes of gender segregation and its link to skills shortages in the UK labour market, by investigating young people’s perceptions about work and their preferences for jobs. In particular, the aim is to identify ways of ensuring that young people’s occupational choices are not determined by their gender or stereotypica...

Research into children's awareness of group differences has been an active area of research for some time, with work focusing on areas such as nationality, ethnicity, gender and religion. The majority of the work in these areas has taken the cognitive-constructivist framework as a background, offering a domain-general approach to all social cogniti...

In this chapter, we review the research literature on children's geographical knowledge about countries. During the course of their development, children acquire a large body of knowledge about countries: they learn about the existence, location, size and shape of many different countries, they learn about the natural and man-made features (e. g. m...

As learning is identified as a main motive for family travel, this study explores the link between children's demographic characteristics, travel experience and their geographical knowledge. Interviews were conducted with 261 children, aged 6 to 13, in nineteen schools in England. To validate the children's reports of travel experience, a questionn...