The personal life situation versus identity behaviours manifested by university students from cultural borderlands – a socio-pedagogical comparative study

In the pedagogical analysis undertaken in this study, some theoretical and methodological conceptualizations were applied, referring to the model of youth’s quality of life, developed on the basis of qualitative material collected in the course of international comparative studies – Tadeusz Lewowicki’s Theory of Identity Behaviors and Harold J. Noah’s model of comparing the quality of academic education. The basis for outlining the relationship between students’ life satisfaction and their sense of identity in the local, regional, national, European and supra-European dimension was the comparative research conducted in 2019–2021 in the Polish-Czech-Slovak borderland. The analysis and interpretation of the collected empirical material show that – although the neighbouring countries have undergone political changes, they belong to the European Union, and they collaborate in many areas – the living standards, but above all the influences in the educational sphere, the models and social values, as well as in lifestyles, are significantly different.