Spies and security: Assessing the impact of animated videos on intelligence services in school children

Abstract

Making the work of security organizations known to school children is a means of mitigating feelings of insecurity provoked by the diffusion of information on terrorist attacks in communications media and through social media. Whilst there is a longer tradition of projects to educate school children on the police and the armed forces, no comparable projects have been found on the intelligence services. With the objective of filling this gap, the authors designed and produced two animated educational videos for Spanish school children on the Spanish intelligence service: The National Intelligence Center (CNI). In this paper, the impact of the videos is measured in relation to the knowledge, the stereotypes, and the attitudes of school children towards the CNI. To do so, two questionnaires were administered to 1,092 school children aged 8 and 12, before and after viewing the videos. The results of the questionnaire prior to screening the videos showed that the school children held no knowledge of the intelligence services, and expressed highly developed stereotypes, and moderately negative attitudes towards them. Student-t tests for related samples were used to confirm the responses, on the basis of which it was found that the videos modified both knowledge and stereotyping, as well as attitudes towards the CNI. Specifically, following the screenings the knowledge of the school children improved, stereotyping diminished, and positive attitudes increased. Dar a conocer a los escolares las organizaciones de seguridad es un medio para reducir la inseguridad generada por la difusión de los atentados terroristas en los medios de comunicación y redes sociales. Mientras que hay una mayor tradición en proyectos para educar a los escolares sobre la policía y los militares, no se han encontrado proyectos análogos sobre los servicios de inteligencia. Con el objetivo de suplir esta carencia, los autores diseñaron y produjeron dos vídeos animados educativos destinados a escolares españoles sobre el servicio de inteligencia español, el Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI). Este artículo mide cuál es el impacto de los vídeos en el conocimiento, los estereotipos y las actitudes de los escolares hacia el CNI. Para ello, se aplicaron dos cuestionarios a 1.092 escolares de 8 a 16 años, antes y después de la visualización de los vídeos. Los resultados previos a la visualización mostraron un conocimiento nulo, alto grado de estereotipos y actitudes moderadamente negativas hacia los servicios de inteligencia. Se comprobaron las respuestas mediante pruebas T para muestras relacionadas, a partir de las cuales se obtuvo que los vídeos modificaban el conocimiento, los estereotipos y las actitudes hacia el CNI. Específicamente, tras la visualización mejoró el conocimiento de los escolares, disminuyó el grado de estereotipos y aumentaron las actitudes positivas.

The Gender Gap Among EduTubers and the Factors Significantly Influencing It

“…In addition, some studies have shown that a platform like YouTube can become a hub to work on reducing stereotypes in education (Díaz-Fernández & del Real-Castrillo, 2018) or encouraging digital practices aimed at preventing gender-based violence (Morales, Aran-Ramspott, & Fedele, 2020). However, no research works have thoroughly dealt with a potential gender gap among EduTubers as a group so far, a lack that this work sets out to address.…”