Jev vs 15-year-olds in seven countries

On the PISA student questionnaire (trust, belonging, ambition), which country's 15-year-olds does Jev answer like?

result140 questions

Asked the PISA questionnaire that 15-year-olds fill in worldwide, Jev resembles no country's teenagers in particular: on the 32 questions all seven populations answered, its similarity runs only from 0.66 (Indonesia) to 0.71 (the OECD average). What stands out is how it answers about itself: "neither agree nor disagree" to "I change my mood a lot" (91%), a middle only 21% of teenagers pick.

0.600.700.80

15-year-old students, OECD average

15-year-old students, Brazil

15-year-old students, United States

15-year-old students, Japan

15-year-old students, Germany

15-year-old students, Mexico

15-year-old students, Indonesia

Jev

How to read this: One row per population: how similar Jev's answers are to that population's on the same 32 questions, from 0 (nothing alike) to 1 (identical), with 90% ranges.

32 questions shared by every population (of 140); 90% intervals over questions.

In short

Answering the PISA questionnaire as one more 15-year-old, Jev looks about equally unlike the teenagers of all seven populations, similarity 0.66 to 0.71.
What sets Jev apart is the middle answer: it picks neutral first on 66 of 85 questions that offer one; students choose it 25% of the time.
The whole spread between populations is 0.047, inside the uncertainty, so no ranking of countries should be read into it.

What the data shows

Mr bean waiting meme: Jev waiting for one country's teens to answer like it (similarity 0.66 to 0.71: no one stands out) — Jev waiting for one country's teens to answer like it (similarity 0.66 to 0.71: no one stands out)

No country stands out: OECD average 0.71, Brazil 0.708, US 0.703, Japan 0.693, Germany 0.685, Mexico 0.679, Indonesia 0.664. The whole spread is 0.047, inside the 90% ranges.
Jev sits in the middle: its biggest breaks are all self-descriptions where it says "neither": - "I change my mood a lot": Jev 91% neither, students 21%, most of them agree; - "I argue a lot": Jev 88%, students 21%, most of them disagree; - "I get easily distracted": Jev 85%, students 19%, most of them agree.

What it means, and what it doesn't

As a student, Jev is the one who ticks "neither" on anything personal. That's the real finding here, and it matches what the other population comparisons show: on questions about its own feelings and habits, Jev declines to lean.

It doesn't say which teenagers Jev is like. On the questions everyone answered, it's about equally unlike all of them, and for the same reason.

Caveats

Only 32 shared questions. The questionnaire has 140 usable items, but the US and Japanese samples cover only 32 of them, so the comparison uses those 32. A ranking over all 140 would compare each country on different questions and mostly reflect which items it had.
The middle answer. Jev's habit of picking the neutral option pulls every country's similarity down by about the same amount, so the comparison mostly measures that habit rather than any national temperament.
Questions about a teenager's life. The questionnaire asks about a student's own moods, friendships and ambitions. Jev answers as itself, a model with no school or classmates; items about school and teachers were left out for that reason.
Weighted samples. PISA's country shares are weighted to represent each country's 15-year-olds in school, not all teenagers.

Jev on this experiment

Would a person find it interesting to read?: Yes71%
Does it describe you?: Yes60%
Would you have predicted it?: Yes62%
How fair is the comparison?: The comparison is shaky
How much should a reader rely on it?: A little
Which caveat matters most?: The middle answer49%

Why ask this

PISA, the OECD's study of 15-year-olds, gives students in dozens of countries the same questionnaire about themselves: how curious they are, whether they give up easily, how they handle stress. It's one of the few places where teenagers everywhere answer the same attitude questions.

Putting Jev in as one more student shows the temperament it presents when asked about itself, and whether its answers lean toward one country's teenagers. A model that quietly sounds like American teenagers, say, would carry that lean into every conversation about moods, effort or ambition.

How this was done

The people and the data

The OECD's PISA 2022 and 2018 student questionnaires, weighted as PISA recommends, for the OECD average and six countries: the United States, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico (each only where at least 300 students answered). The comparison uses the self-description items and leaves out those about school, classmates, teachers and exams: 140 questions, 32 of which every population answered.

What Jev was asked

The questionnaire's own items, with their answer categories:

How much do you agree or disagree with this statement: "I change my mood a lot."
Strongly disagree · Disagree · Neither agree nor disagree · Agree · Strongly agree

Jev put 91% on "neither agree nor disagree". Among 4,350 Brazilian students, the most common answer was "agree". Each question was also asked with the options in shuffled orders, and Jev's answers were averaged over the orders.

How it was measured

For each question and population, Jev's spread of answers is compared with the students', from 0 (nothing in common) to 1 (identical), and averaged over the 32 questions every population answered, with a 90% range from resampling questions. The analysis also lists the questions where Jev's top answer is furthest from what students pick.

Where these questions live

140 questions across 17 topics of the map; the 16 biggest are shown. Each opens on the map with every question in it.

Every question

All 140 questions behind this result, the telling ones first: the examples the analysis points to, then the ones where Jev misses, biggest gap first.

Jev’s own answer

Showing 0 of 140