Challenging the Assumption of a Western Phenomenon: Academic Entitlement in Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT

Academic entitlement (AE) is increasingly associated with problematic behaviors and attitudes, including student incivility and endorsement of cheating. As research on this context-specific form of entitlement increases, no one has yet explored the rates of occurrence outside of North America. To investigate whether students at North American universities are alone in their endorsement of academically entitled beliefs and behaviors, we administered a bidimensional (entitled expectations and externalized responsibility) AE measure to university students in Saudi Arabia and the United States. Contrary to expectations, the Saudi Arabian students, particularly the women, reported on this measure higher levels of AE than the American students. However, in the Saudi sample, academic entitlement was associated with self-esteem and not with narcissism or independent self-construal. While these results challenge the assumptions that AE is an exclusive Western educational phenomenon, they also raise questions about the potentially different meaning of AE in non-Western cultures and the validity and reliability of AE measurement.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic entitlement
• attitudes
• culture
• gender issues
• higher education

Note

Funding

Funding for a portion of this study was provided by the Junior Faculty Research Grant (Project #: JF101008) award by KFUPM's Deanship of Scientific Research.

Notes

1. To provide information about the equivalence of the AE measure's structure across our two cultural groups, we conducted a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (McInerney & Ali, 2006). We found that the two-factor model (ER and EE subscales) was a good fit to the data [CMIN/DF = 2.867, CFI = .848, RMSEA = .047, (.042−.052)] and a better fit than a one-factor model (ΔΧ² (2) = 400.587, p < .001. The fit statistics of the invariance model [ΔΧ² (12) = 13.754, p < .32] suggest that the two-factor model can be considered invariant across the two cultural groups (American and Saudi Arabian). This provides evidence for the applicability of the measure to cultures outside of the United States.