What does it take to promote cooperative competitive citizenship in a community?

Fülöp, Márta and Takács, Szabolcs and Büki, Lívia Noémi (2013) What does it take to promote cooperative competitive citizenship in a community? In: Identities and citizenship education: Controversy, crisis and challenges. London Metropolitan University, pp. 1-12.

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Abstract

Each human group (a school class, a working team, a local community etc.) is a complex system of cooperative and competitive relationships. These two interpersonal relations are intertwined, however it is not indifferent in what way and to what degree. It is a goal of each group to be able to establish a balance between them that contributes to the most constructive functioning. | The goal of the present research was to identify those conditions and their interrelationship that may promote a beneficial combination of cooperation and competition i.e. cooperative competition. In addition we wanted to reveal how the potentials of cooperative competition may vary according to different life domains. In our study the Critical Incident Technique (Flanagan, 1954) was applied. This procedure is based on the direct observation of human behaviour. The respondent has to describe freely events, as much in detail as possible that meet certain criteria. The procedure was elaborated in order to examine complex interpersonal phenomena and to provide ecological validity. Altogether 431 stories were analyzed described by university students and primary and secondary school teachers. They were instructed to recall competitive relationships that have certain characteristics (e.g. high degree of cooperation among the parties – no cooperation among the parties; high degree of trust among the parties – high degree of distrust among the parties etc.). After the free description of the ‘story’ the participants had to answer specific questions to characterize the competitive event along different dimensions with a Likert-type scale, e.g. intense/not intense; kept the rules/violated the rules etc. Applying factor analysis four different scales were constructed: the Relationship scale (cooperation, trust, communication), the Motivation scale (motivation, the importance of the goal, development, learning), the Rule keeping scale (rule keeping, no aggression, no manipulation) and the Enjoyment scale (enjoyment, positive stress). A correlational analysis revealed how these different scales relate to each other. The critical incidents were also content analysed and categorized according to the life domain in which the competition took place. The interrelation of the different relationship and situational variables with the life domain was also examined in order to reveal if in different life domains there are different potentials to form cooperative competitive relationships.

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