Nationale dagen en nationale kernwaarden

During national commemorations the core values of a society are communicated. In the Netherlands the Liberation and freedom in general are annually celebrated by means of large-scaled Liberation Festivals. Based upon the literature on national days and the program of these Liberation Festivals it can be expected that such festivals increase the awareness around freedom. In order to examine to what extent visiting a Liberation Festival indeed increases the appreciation of freedom we have collected survey data on five Liberation Festivals in 2014. In total more than 1000 visitors of these festivals participated in our study. The visitors indeed do think about the Liberation and about freedom during their visit. More than 50 percent of the visitors said that they think about the Liberation in 1945 and more than 90 percent of the visitors indicated that they believe it is important to think about people who are currently not living in freedom. By comparing awareness about freedom of people before they have visited the Liberation Festival with awareness about freedom of people after they visited the festival no evidence was found for the hypothesis that visiting a Liberation Festival increases awareness about freedom. We furthermore expected that visiting a Liberation Festival would be more influential for higher educated persons and for visitors who are in their formative years (between 17 and 25 years old). These hypotheses were also not confirmed by the analyses. In the concluding section implications of these findings as well as suggestions for future research are formulated.