EVALUATION REPORT
International seminar:
“Contemporary citizenship: the politics of exclusion and inclusion”
Ljubljana, Etnografski muzej, November 22-24, 2002.
International seminar “Contemporary citizenship: the politics of exclusion and
inclusion” was organised by the Peace Institute and financially supported by the East
East Cooperation Center (Peace Institute).
The main purpose of the two-day international seminar was to rethink and reconsider
contemporary concepts of citizenship and try to develop an extended notion of
citizenship which would overcome some of the problems and limitations of existing
ones. The question, how the existing concepts of citizenship, along with their legal
and political basis and activities derived therefore, influence the politics of
exclusion/inclusion of marginalized individuals and groups, was also discussed.
The international seminar was divided into two parts: seminar itself and a workshop.
At the workshop participants discussed the preparation of a framework for the second
(follow up) seminar. The main purpose of the workshop was to identify:
 The important themes for the particular countries
 Common things/themes/topics
 Problems with concepts
 Is it possible/how to undertake (tackle) the common topics in the particular
countries: composition of the matrix of inclusion/exclusion or something else?
30 participants (participants from the Peace Institute included) attended this international
seminar, 14 of them came from abroad. There were also some participants from Slovenia that
attended different parts of the seminar.
The purpose of the evaluation is to analyse the level of success of the seminar in general.
Following this aim the questionnaire was used as a method of the evaluation: participants
were asked to fill in the questionnaire after the seminar. 17 questionnaires were given back to
the organiser for analysis. Participants, coming from Peace Institute, were not included in the
evaluation process. The questionnaire was anonymous, meaning that participants were not
asked to fill in their name.
The questionnaire had two parts: one with closed questions and the second one with open –
ended questions. The first part consisted of three questions: evaluating the content, structure
and the organization of the seminar. Answers of the participants were measured using Likert’s
1-to-5 scale, where 1 meant “strongly disagree”, 5 “strongly agree”. The second part of the
questionnaire included two open-ended questions, with which we wanted to explore what did
they miss at the seminar, what and how would participants improve the course and they were
asked to provide suggestions and comments.
We used SPSS program to analyse the results at the first 3 levels. Open-ended questions were
analysed separately.
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Seminar Estimation
There were three indicators on the basis of which course content was measured. See below the
average estimation (1-to-5-scale):
Indicator
1. Content
2. Structure
3. Organization
Mean value
4,2
4,2
4,9
The results show us that the average estimation of each of the stated indicators is high: mean
value of the all indicators exceeds 4. Results show us that the course fulfilled its scope: 47,0%
participants stated that they strongly agree with the selected content of the seminar (they
encircled the number 5); 35,0% encircled the number 4. 35,0% participants stated that they
strongly agree with the structure of the seminar (they encircled the number 5); 47,0%
encircled the number 4. The vast majority of participants was very satisfied with the
organization - 88,0% participants encircled the number 5. (This percentage includes two
special numbers: + 5 and 10).
“Open-ended questions”
The last part of the questionnaire included two open-ended questions: we asked participants,
what did they miss at the seminar, what and how would they improve the course and they
were asked to provide suggestions and comments. Participants were asked to write down their
ideas.
What participants missed most was more time for discussions, panel discussion, roundtable
and more workshops. Some of the comments were encouraging the organizers to continue in
this direction (like “just go on!”). There were only few suggestions on the structure for the
follow-up conference.
Three participants left this part of the questionnaire empty. The possible interpretation would
be that they didn’t miss anything and were satisfied with the seminar in whole. We can
assume this, because the closed questions were very good evaluated.
Conclusions:
The seminar can be evaluated as very successful, mean values, estimating each of the
measured focuses – seminar content, seminar structure and organization – are very high. On a
1-to-5 scale where 1 stands for “strongly disagree” and 5 “strongly agree” all of the
mentioned focuses were estimated with more then 4 as a mean value in average (4,4). If we
sum up responses given to the open-ended questions we can conclude that participants
expressed a need to organize more activities covering this specific subject in the future. There
were even encouraging requests toward organizers to organize more events in the near future.
Prepared by Mojca Sušnik, Project coordinator, Peace Institute
December 2002
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