Identity and attitudes of academic youth – a Polish-Czech comparative study

The article is a report on comparative studies carried out in the PolishCzech borderland in 2022–2023 among pedagogy students of Polish and Czech universities. The research was placed in the objectivist paradigm and the survey method was applied. The study was aimed at determining the sense of identity of young people, at learning about values, attitudes towards other nations and types of intergroup interactions taking place in the borderland. In order to check whether there are statistically significant differences between the groups in the responses to individual questions, the Mann-Whitney U test was used. In the context of the obtained results, it can be concluded that academic youth from the Polish and Czech parts of the borderland attribute significant importance to belonging to one biological species inhabiting the earth (no statistically significant differences between groups). Polish youth are similar to their peers living in the Czech Republic. The similarities pertain to identification in the system: person – gender – nationality, to positive attitude towards other nations and to values. There are statistically significant differences between the two cohorts in their attitudes towards individual nations and in their assessment of the types of social interactions occurring in the borderland. The specificity and differences have their sources in the sociocultural, political and economic situation of the country in which the young live and in the educational system to which they have been subjected. The future is a never-ending project that is constantly changing. Borderland research is the analysis of contexts in which the construction of the vision and the use of the realities of the existing social space take place. Research on academic youth provides information not only about its condition and the image of contemporary borderland, but also about its desired shape.