Hierarchy of Multicultural Criteria among Public University Students in Malaysia

Abstract

The article aims to examine the multicultural levels among students in Malaysian public universities based on six multicultural criteria: ethnicity, language, religion, gender, socioeconomic status, and mental and physical capabilities. The study respondents were 330 public university (PU) students who met two requirements for the sample selection, which were having multiple cultural backgrounds and being a student for at least three semesters. The research instrument was a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire consisting of 30 questions related to cultural background. Reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) was in the high classification of greater than 0.7. The percentage frequency of the six multicultural criteria also showed diverse responses ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” Among the six levels of multicultural criteria, language (M = 3.71, SD= .682), gender (M = 3.92, SD = .880), and religion (M = 4.34, SD = .617) were at high average levels, mental and physical abilities (M = 3.33, SD = .745) and ethnicity (M = 3.57, SD = .885) were at medium levels, and socioeconomic status (M = 2.44, SD = .943) was low on average. The correlation between multicultural criteria also showed that each criterion had a strong significant relationship with the other criteria when the correlation coefficient exceeded 0.7 (p < 0.01). Overall, we found that socioeconomic status was still at low levels and should be given attention in the activities at the PU level. The implications of this study could help in designing strategic measures to address the issues among multicultural communities in Malaysia