Original scientific paper
What affects the image of Croatia abroad? Opinions of Croatian citizens
Ksenija Klasnić
orcid.org/0000-0001-9362-6739
; Department of sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Izvor Rukavina
; Department of sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
According to popular opinion of Croatian citizens, the image of Croatia in other countries is mostly influenced by three contents: tourism, areas of natural beauty and Croatian athletes, while freedom of press and political ideologies (communist legacy, antifascism and Ustashe) are ranked as contents of the lowest influence. The analysis of latent space revealed five dimensions of the image of Croatia: tourist, Balkan, modern, patriotic and innovative. Each of these dimensions can (only) partially be interpreted by some socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents. With regards to the distribution of the variables that constitute them, a conclusion can be made that the perception of tourist and Balkan image of Croatia is represented the most. A comparative analysis of the results from 2004 and 2010 revealed that the greatest changes in the evaluation are those regarding the Hague indictments, whose influence has decreased, and sports fans behavior, whose influence on the formation of the image of Croatia has increased. An increased influence, compared with 2004, was also found with regards to the areas of natural beauty, inventions, as well as corruption and organized crime. There were also changes in the latent structure where a number of dimensions has decreased and certain contents did not group in the same way.
Keywords
image of Croatia abroad; identity; areas of natural beauty; tourism; latent structure analysis
Hrčak ID:
70813
URI
Publication date:
20.7.2011.
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