People vs. Government
 

I am conducting an international survey on how people from around the world perceive particular countries (both people and governments).

I am really interested to learn the opinion of people of Belgium, so I would greatly appreciate if you could participate in this project by filling out this 19 question survey: http://survelum.com/pg/

The results are instantly published online and will also be presented in a research paper.

I appologize for using English and thank you so much!

Done.

The results are very interesting, I must say!

done, what is the goal of the survey?

Noord Korea wint het maar nip van de USA voor wat de negatieve houding betreft van de deelnemers tegenover de politieke leiders:

79% tov 77%

Leerrijk...

Axes of evil...

Tuurlijk, voor een hele hoop mensen mag je frauderen, moorden, hoofden afhakken, aanslagen plegen,...zolang je maar geen amerikaan bent.

Als de amerikanen morgen de honger uit de wereld helpen zullen er nog als eerste reactie hebben "wat een puinhoop in irak".

En dat vinden de Amerikanen dan nog zelf, want ze vormen een meerderheid in deze polll...

En Vietnam niet vergeten, he?! :twisted:8-)

Thank you so much!!!

Thank you! The goal of this study is to check if some assumptions (rather in linguistics, then in sociology or political science) made are good and, of course, trying to find anything unexpected.

The first rather simple but intriguing conclusions are that people almost never associate their own country with government and politics and that the more a country is associated with the government and politics the worse is attitude toward people of such a country.

Another surprising thing is that women perceive other nations significantly different from men. Unfortunately, at the moment there are too few female respondents to make any solid hypothesis.

Yet another surprising thing is relatively negative attitude toward people of North Korea -- I could expect some sympathy (at least Neutral rather then Negative) toward population tortured by the dictator (at least as presented by mass media), but, seemingly I was wrong -- North Korean people are the least popular.

More fun to discover as more people from around the world present their opinions. We are looking to receive 1,500-2,000 responses within a few months.

Again, I appologize for messing up the forum with English and I do appreciate your assistance.

In case that anyone is curious to see the results, but doesn't want to take the survey, here is the results link: http://www.survelum.com/results.php?pg (about 300 responses thus far).

If you find this data useful for your course paper, or a newspaper article, or whatever other activity, please feel free to use the data any way you wish with no restrictions whatsoever.

thank you for your explanation. It is indeed an interesting study how the perception is towards people in a certain country.

Indeed, most interesting. I'll keep an eye on it.

Remarcable but at the end no unexpected results. It is a creative way to identify and visualize ... congratulations.

The result which I find the most fascinating is the huge difference between perception of the American people and the American government. Only 14 % of the respondents have a negative attitude towards the American people, while the American government scores much worse with 75 %. only the North-Korean government has a slightly higher figure with 79%.
This means two things.
1) The accusations of "anti-americanism" are incorrect. There is in fact a general dislike of the America government, inside and outside the USA. American as a people are well loved, generally spoken.
2) People either know less about the atrocities committed by Putin and the Chinese ruling party than they know about war crimes and other bad things done by the Americans. Or they have higher expectations when it comes to a democratic country like the USA.

Things get polarised between people and government, for the moment, so it seems...
That's especially true for Americans.

What is your gender?
Male
Female
Something else

lol @ nr 3 ;)

Er staan wel meer grapjes in.

We know the most what the American government does, China and Russia and especially North-Korea have less press-freedom, so we don't know a lot of this countries.

That conclusion is only logical. The "anti-americanism"-card is usually drawn by someone who's cornered in a discussion. It's his/her only way out, since he/she doesn't have any rational arguments left (if there were any in the first place). And I know this from my own experience. I have often been called an "anti-american", whilst the opposit is true. I'm just very critical (and hateful, yes, I admit...) of the US governement.

The same goes for "patriotism", which is widely abused these days. The only real american patriots, in my opinion, are those who dare criticize the US governement and try to keep them accountable for their actions, however difficult and futile it may be.

The Founding Fathers must be turning over in their grave..

Thank you! Your feedback is really important for me.

a few people chose that option ;-)