The Meaning of Patriotism Among Malaysians: A Quantitative Study Towards Reinforcement of National Identity and Nation State

Abstract

Patriotism is a sentiment that is the love and devotion to one’s country. A sense of ‘patriotism’ is not present by itself in human life, but this feeling has to be propagated, fertilized and nurtured to be powerful in the soul of each and every citizen. The paper aims to present two key areas of this study firstly to identify the meaning of patriotism among Malaysians general publics and also to compare with the government’s patriotism efforts that involve awareness campaigns and educational programs; secondly it investigates whether the government’s perception of patriotism is align with the public’s perception which relates to five categories of patriotism which are blind, constructive, constitutional, education, and symbolic patriotism. A structured close ended questionnaire was used with 300 respondents from different races selected from the Klang Valley areas. The research instrument was adopted from various researchers and modified to suit the Malaysia context of research. The analysis result shows that there is sufficient evident to support the hypothesis 7: There is significant relationship between the government’s patriotism concepts with the public’s perception with the correlation results (r = .646, p < 0.01). In short, effort in increasing the love towards the country is successful and is aligned with the Malaysian’s patriotism concepts. This shows that the in-group respondents view themselves as more patriotic compared to how they view the general Malaysian on being patriotic. The respondents think that most of the general Malaysians or out-group is not patriotic as they should be.