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Civic Engagement and the Emergence of Race: American Youth Negotiate Citizenship
Abstract
Purpose - This paper aims to provide insight into high school students' understanding and experience of citizenship and civic engagement in the United States today. Methodological approach - To supplement literature that reports the causes and correlates of youth civic engagement, this qualitative study explores the form and meaning of citizenship to young Americans. Drawing on observations and interviews with 116 high school students aged 14-19 years, this study explores how youth construct the meaning of citizenship and civic engagement. Findings - I find that race and racial identity are emergent in young people's construction of citizenship. Youth articulate the status of citizen on the basis of "privilege" and feel fortunate to be American. Forms of civic engagement vary by race with white students positioning themselves as helpers and delineating lower income minorities as "others" while also engaging in civic activity out of individual motivations and weak community connections. Minority youth express a desire to stay out of trouble, but also contest the boundaries of citizenship through forms of engagement that connect them to community. Value of paper - This paper contributes to understanding how race is emergent for young people's definitions of citizenship and civic actions. In addition to demonstrating how the categories of race and citizen are mutually constructed, it shows the value of looking beyond simple measurements of civic activity and exploring the meaning of youth civic work to gain insight into contemporary youth and democracy.
... Elevers kunskaper om politik och färdigheter i politisk analys följer samma mönster som skolresultat i många andra ämnen, nämligen att elevers socioekonomiska bakgrund och föräldrars utbildningsbakgrund spelar stor roll (Schulz m.fl., 2010;Torney-Purta, Lehmann, Oswald & Schulz, 2001). Sammantaget kommer en stor del av forskningen kring relationen mellan elevers sociala bakgrund och deras föreställningar fram till att elevers förståelse av och kunskap om samhälleliga begrepp och idéer i stor utsträckning kan förklaras av deras erfarenheter och kulturella identitet (Barton & Avery, 2016;Morimoto, 2013). Elever i olika nationella skolsystem förefaller till exempel prioritera olika slags medborgerliga dygder. ...
... Resultaten motsäger inte den forskning som visar att elevers tidigare erfarenheter och uppfattningar spelar stor roll för hur de ser på ett ämnesinnehåll (jfr Barton & Avery, 2016, Morimoto, 2013Schulz m.fl., 2010;Torney-Purta m.fl., 2001), men pekar också mot att undervisning kan göra skillnad om den utformas noggrant. Studiernas resultat utmanar därmed den statsvetenskapliga forskning kring utbildningens påverkan på ungas medborgarkunskaper som i viss utsträckning har ifrågasatt effekten av undervisning i samhällskunskap (Almgren, 2006;Amnå & Zetterberg, 2010;Broman, 2009;Ekman, 2013;Ekman, 2007). ...
... It is difficult to measure the extent to which social science education influences students' learning of and thinking about social science content. Factors like socioeconomic background, level of parental education and cultural experience play a big part in students' learning in social studies subjects as well as in other school subjects (Barton & Avery, 2016;Morimoto, 2013;Schulz et.al., 2010;Torney-Purta et.al., 2001), and many political science studies notice low effect from education on students' democratic abilities (Almgren, 2006;Amnå & Zetterberg, 2010;Amnå, Ekström & Stattin, 2016;Broman, 2009;Ekman, 2007;Ekman, 2013). These kinds of studies have, however, been criticised for using limited measurements of democratic citizenship, thus leaving little room for understanding how education can influence the lifeworld of the student (Olson, 2012a(Olson, , 2012bSandahl, 2015b). ...
Teachers struggle to design teaching that that will promote students’ social science knowledge in accordance with the citizenship education purpose of the subject. This study aims to expand the knowledge base of social science education by exploring the meaning of, and teaching for, the ability to critically analyse essentially contested value issues, specifically fairness and justice issues, in social science.
The project concludes results from three studies containing five empirical intervention sub-studies of social science teaching, conducted at upper secondary, middle and lower primary school level. All studies were based on the educational design-based research approach learning study,where teaching interventions are designed, analysed and evaluated in collaboration with practising teachers. For the intervention design and the analysis of empirical data, phenomenography, variation theory and activity theory were used.
The results comprise descriptions of what it is means to know how to reason critically about fairness and justice issues in social science, what the critical aspects for learning how to do this are, how this knowing can be related to different teaching practices and design principles, and what indications of an emerging ability to critically analyse these issues can be. The results can be used as tools when designing, implementing and evaluating teaching and as empirically grounded additions to a theoretical description of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge.
Based on the results, the progression of the ability is discussed and a model for social science analytical reasoning (samhällsanalytiskt tänkande) is proposed. The model expresses analytical reasoning in social science as the development of a critical judgement in relation to contested societal issues with the purpose of reaching an agency-directed citizenship education.
... Students from minority groups, on the other hand, are critical of white, middleclass privilege and challenge the boundaries of civic life, claiming that they also deserve to be a part of civic life. This is further discussed by Morimoto (2013), who problematises the very concept of how citizenship is perceived by different groups of young people, thus challenging the basis for citizenship education. ...
This thesis explores what financial literacy is, what financial literacy becomes and what financial literacy could become within the context of a citizenship education such as the Swedish upper secondary subject of social studies. Financial literacy does not intuitively converge with social sciences which leaves social studies teachers to both teach and realise financial literacy. Thus, teachers become co-creators of financial literacy as a school subject. This thesis explores this process via two different studies resulting in four research articles. In the first study, semi-structured interviews – analysed through PCK – are used to explore the perceptions of Swedish social studies teachers in upper secondary school regarding financial literacy teaching and learning. The findings include differences between experienced and novice teachers regarding which content knowledge and pedagogical approaches they use. However, all teachers express difficulties fitting financial literacy into social studies, mainly due to a perception of financial literacy primarily being a private matter, along with the unclear relationship between financial and societal issues. The second study is designed as a financial literacy teaching intervention. Students’ views on a financial dilemma are analysed using citizenship conceptions and threshold concepts. The findings are used to discuss design principles for financial literacy teaching. Salient conclusions in the thesis include citizenship education being able to frame financial literacy and provide epistemic features which can make financial literacy more teachable and learnable. It is hoped that the results from this thesis can inform future financial literacy teaching design as well as policy discussion related to financial literacy teaching and learning contextualised with another subject, especially citizenship education
... Our study responds to a call among researchers across psychology, sociology, and education to examine the civic experiences and outcomes of AAPIs (Chan, 2011;Finlay et al., 2011;Morimoto, 2013;Rogers et al., 2012). We extend research on how marginalization shapes important but overlooked quality-of-life outcomes (e.g., Syed & Juan, 2012;Zhang et al., 2012) by considering how AAPI experiences related to racial discrimination and English proficiency may contribute to civic satisfaction and civic engagement. ...
Objective: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) on average report higher rates of racial discrimination and lower levels of English proficiency than other racial and ethnic groups. Less clear is how these factors may shape AAPIs’ civic outcomes. The current study explored the roles of racial discrimination and English proficiency in AAPIs’ civic satisfaction and civic engagement. Method: Using data from a quality-of-life survey of 2,463 AAPIs from five ethnic subgroups in a large southwestern city, we analyzed (a) whether racial discrimination was associated with lower civic satisfaction but higher civic engagement and (b) whether English proficiency is associated with higher civic satisfaction and civic engagement. Results: Multivariate regression results indicated that racial discrimination was associated with lower levels of civic satisfaction for four AAPI groups (Asian Indian, Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese) but not with higher civic engagement. English proficiency was not consistently associated with civic satisfaction or engagement across AAPI groups. Conclusions: Examining racial discrimination along civic outcomes brings attention to an important dimension of AAPIs’ well-being and lived experiences. Although English proficiency was not associated with civic engagement, the findings on racial discrimination have implications for civic programs, services, and policies that are important for promoting a more inclusive democracy.
... In the same vein, a number of studies have considered the ideal of White performance (i.e., "acting White" or deflecting racial stereotypes) as being integral to U.S. citizenshipequating Whiteness to privilege and Blackness as stigma (L. Davis, 2005;Fordham, 2008;Fordham & Ogbu, 1986;Morimoto, 2013). West (1999) suggested that African Americans have yet to fully capture the experience of being "a citizen among citizens." ...
What it means to be a citizen for groups such as children and African Americans remains a contested, abstract, and evasive concept. This article seeks to gain a greater understanding of citizenship education by injecting the voices of young Black male students who are talked to and talked about but rarely asked to contribute to citizenship discourse. What emerged from these first- and second-grade students is the framework of “maybe citizens.” The maybe citizen embodies two scenarios: a contradiction of title and actions and/or identification by how one is generally (mis)treated by society despite one’s good character and honorable deeds. By combining critical childhood studies and phenomenology, this study captures the rhetoric of democracy versus the reality of democracy from the lens of early elementary Black males.
... Torney-Purta (2002) and Conover and Searing (2000) find that youth have a limited understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, but Sherrod (2008) shows that youth associate citizenship rights with civic, but not political, responsibility. For youth, citizenship is also tied to race and racial identity (Jensen, 2008;Morimoto, 2013) and to activism and social movement (Gordon & Taft, 2011). ...
A national mail survey of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 (n = 876) was conducted immediately before the U.S. presidential election (October 2012) to investigate socialization agents that may correlate with political and civic engagement. The relative importance of potential correlates of engagement including demographics, parents, peers, schools, religion, traditional media, social networks, and digital communication were evaluated. Regression analysis revealed that civically engaged youth identify with a religion, participate in civic education activities at school and extracurricular activities, take action (e.g., boycotting or buycotting), develop attitudes about citizenship, and engage in online/social media political activities. Politically engaged youth come from higher income households, discuss news and politics, take action, and are very prone to engage in online/social media political activities. While a wider range of activities appear to be related to civic engagement, those who are politically engaged appear to have a strong interest in online media usage. Implications are discussed.
... Young people have a variety of ideas about what citizenship entails: doing what is expected, being obedient, following the law (Conover & Searing, 2000, Flanagan, Syvertsen, Gill, Gallay, & Cumsille, 2009, Sherrod, 2008, engaging in social activism (Gordon & Taft, 2011), demonstrating civic responsibility (Sherrod, 2008), as well as one's racial identity (Jensen, 2008;Morimoto, 2013). However, they do not necessarily associate citizenship with traditional political activities (Sherrod, 2008). ...
The authors examine whether predictors of adult political consumerism (i.e., boycotting and buycotting) and factors associated with youth civic and political participation also predict youth political consumerism. Data from a national mail survey of adolescents ages 12 to 17 years and their parents (n = 876) conducted in October 2012 are used to examine predictors of youth political consumerism. Factors analyzed include youth political and civic participation, parental modeling of boycotting and buycotting, and parental encouragement of following news and politics. Other factors examined include youth civic education, extracurricular participation, and youth social or civic attitudes. In addition, the authors assess differences between youth who boycott and those who buycott. The findings show that parental modeling is the most important predictor of youth political consumerism, and young political consumers also engage in civic and political activities. Moreover, youth boycotters and buycotters appear to exhibit differences in political ideology and motivations for political consumerism.
Amidst current research on the positive impact of rising rates of youth civic participation, but also indications of a shift in the underlying forms of civic life and increasing socioeconomic disparities in levels of participation, the authors investigate the meaning of civic engagement from the perspective of high-school–aged youth. The authors inductively develop a typology of engagement based on in-depth interviews with a purposive stratified sample of eighty-nine high school students in a Midwestern city. The authors find that youth link civic engagement with ambition and achievement as a means to build capital in a Bourdieuian field of youth achievement. While civic engagement is informed by structural position, youth are actively involved in navigating their positions and choices. Civic engagement emerges primarily through volunteerism as youth struggle to assemble and deploy capital in the achievement field and thus compound class-based disparities in civic involvement.
Media is now central to how youth form their identities. Media also shapes the cultural background of much of young people’s action and decision making and the institutional framework of social interaction. This article explores this mediated “lifeworld” of young people by examining rates of current media use and the infiltration of media into conventional forms of socialization such as schools, family, and peers. The authors argue that increasing media use coincides with a larger structural shift to an information-based society wherein social relationships are constituted and reinforced through a cycle of “networked individualism” and growing “risk” among youth. The authors illustrate the cycle of media use, individualization, and risk by briefly examining (a) rising economic insecurity among all Americans and American youth in particular, and (b) the contradictions minority youth face in navigating structural barriers to achievement. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of their work and suggesting policy directions for youth in a media-saturated society.
Survey-based research on Whites' racial attitudes in the USA has characterized their views as either `tolerant' or `ambivalent'. We argue that surveys on racial attitudes have systematically underestimated the extent of prejudice in the White population. The legal and normative changes created by the civil rights movement of the 1960s brought a new racial ideology (`color blind racism'), with new topics and a new form. These matters were examined by collecting survey and interview data from college students in three universities. The main findings were that White respondents appear to be more prejudiced in the interviews than in the survey, use a new racetalk to avoid appearing `racist', and that the themes and arguments that they mobilize are congruent with what other analysts have labeled as `laissez faire' or `competitive' racism.
This research assumes a relatively stable lifeworld for young people. For example, it assumes that the meaning of volunteering or service is sufficiently similar across multiple contexts to remain a valid and stable indicator. By extension, it also assumes that the lifeworld of young people today is not undergoing a period of rapid, and perhaps even radical, change. This research began with the assumption that it is possible that a series of structural and environmental changes in the lives of young people had occurred in the past ten years or so that were sufficiently strong to have reconfigured the civic ecology, the overall environment in which young people are socialized into civic life. The hope was to reconstruct this ecology on a community wide scale. It was the intention to reconstruct the most significant networks and institutions that shaped the lives of young people as an environment in a single community, Madison, Wisconsin. The hope was further to purposively sample across these multiple networks, in order to demonstrate in some depth the quality of connection and disconnection of young people to these networks, and further, to gauge the meanings that young people themselves ascribed to these attachments. This goal was partially successful. A systematically stratified purposive sampling frame (described in this paper) that allowed identification and interviews of a very diverse group of almost 100 young people in many different contexts of their lives, ranging from the most formal institutions of school, across multiple semi-formal contexts of civic youth organizations, clubs, and volunteer settings, to informal contexts of association was constructed. Put simply, young people?s civic activities and attitudes were greatly shaped by three broad processes: (1) First, family socialization was still a prime determinant of what kinds of activities young people would engage in and why they would do so; (2) Second, the institutional setting of school ined primary context that organized these activities and channeled them in a variety of directions, supplemented in important ways by after-school settings and clubs, service, and volunteer activities; and (3) Finally, the future expectations of young people had a much stronger force in shaping what kinds of activities they engaged in and why than had been expected. Specifically, the role of college loomed larger in the lives of many of the young people and this was true across class and racial backgrounds. Many young people told us that one important reason for their civic engagement was the desire to build a resume for college admission, or in their own words, "resume-padding." And this was so whether they were oriented toward an Ivy League school, state university, or even the local technical college. Almost all of the young people interviewed expected (or at least hoped) to better their lives and linked these expectations to college education, and a majority linked their hopes for college admission to service. (Contains 3 endnotes.) [This paper was produced by Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), University of Maryland.]
What is the relationship between social movements and electoral politics? Although the empirical reality of American politics has increasingly blurred the lines between activism and electoral politics, sociology has yet to explore these changes and provide theoretical and methodological tools to understand them. Focusing on the experience of young Americans, this review explores this relationship and outlines opportunities for future research. It is broken down into three sections. First, I review the main themes in the study of youth political participation in America. Second, using examples from the 2008 election, the article examines recent increases in youth participation. Third and finally, this article discusses the case of the Obama campaign, its transition into the Democratic National Committee's Organizing for America, and aspects of the 2012 election to highlight the complex relationship between movements and electoral politics in America today. The paper concludes by highlighting opportunities ...
Taking the position that there is a developmental process in the formation of citizenship, the authors reviewed studies that reported a link between youth's participation in organized activities and civic behaviors 15 or more years later in adulthood. Data uniformly showed that students who participated in high school government or community service projects, meant in the broad sense, are more likely to vote and to join community organizations than are adults who were nonparticipants during high school. Results support the authors' view that participation during the youth era can be seminal in the construction of civic identity that includes a sense of agency and social responsibility in sustaining the community's well-being.
This study examined young adult sequelae of participation in high school activities and identity group for 900 participants from the Michigan Study of Life Transitions.Participation at Grade 10 in high school activities predicted later substance use, psychological adjustment, and educational and occupational outcomes.Prosocial activity participation predicted lower substance use and higher self-esteem and an increased likelihood of college graduation.Performing arts participation predicted more years of education as well as increases in drinking between ages 18 and 21 and higher rates of suicide attempts and psychologist visits by the age of 24.Sports participation predicted positive educational and occupational outcomes and lower levels of social isolation but also higher rates of drinking. Breakfast Club identity categories were predictive of both levels and longitudinal patterns in substance use, education and work outcomes, and psychological adjustment.In general, Jocks and Brains showed the most positive adjustment and Criminals the least.
One of the primary aims of education in the United States is to prepare youth to contribute to civic life in a democracy. Urban youth have daily school and community experiences with poverty, violence, and injustice that complicate their relationship with civic life. In this article the authors explore the ramifications of these experiences for youth civic identity development and consider how new understandings of the civic learning and identity development of urban adolescents might be used to rejuvenate civic education practices and, by extension, the civic mission of schooling.
In this illuminating look at what constitutes American citizenship, Judith Shklar identifies the right to vote and the right to work as the defining social rights and primary sources of public respect. She demonstrates that in recent years, although all profess their devotion to the work ethic, earning remains unavailable to many who feel and are consequently treated as less than full citizens.
Understanding White Privilege focuses squarely on white privilege and its implications by offering specific suggestions for what each person can do to bridge the racial divide. She goes through the process of what happens when white people realize the implications of the social forces that benefit them and attempts to outline steps to help white people respond to racial hierarchies in a productive manner. She seeks to build authentic relationships across race while giving white people the ability to take ownership of responsibility for racism and its negative effects. This will help white people talk about race without defaulting to defensiveness of guilt.
James Youniss and Miranda Yates present a sophisticated analysis of community service's beneficial effects on adolescents' political and moral identity.
Using a case study from a predominantly Black, urban high school in Washington, D.C., Youniss and Yates build on the insights of Erik Erikson on the social and historical nature of identity development. They show that service at a soup kitchen as part of a course on social justice gives youth the opportunity to reflect on their status in society, on how society is organized, on how government should use its power, and on moral principles related to homelessness and poverty. Developing a sense of social responsibility and a civic commitment, youth come to see themselves as active agents in society.
The most authoritative work to date on the subject, this book challenges negative stereotypes of contemporary adolescents and illustrates how youth, when given the opportunity, can use their talents for social good. It will interest readers concerned with the development of today's youth and tomorrow's society.
Bass booms from custom speakers, pick-up trucks boast lowered suspensions, chrome rims reflect stoplights, and bare arms dangle from open windows. Welcome to Santa Clara Street in San Jose, California, where every weekend kids come to cruise late at night, riding their cars slow and low. On the surrounding, less-traveled streets you can also find young men racing customized cars to see who has the "go," not just the "show." And, in the daylight hours, in a nearby suburb, you might find a brand new SUV parked in the driveway, a parents' Sweet 16 present. In Fast Cars, Cool Rides Amy Best provides a fascinating account of kids and car culture. Encompassing everything from learning to drive to getting one's license, from cruising to customizing, from racing to buying one's first car, Best shows that never before have cars played such an important role in the lives of America's youth as they do today. Drawing on interviews with over 100 young men and women, aged 15-24, and five years of research-cruising hot spots, sitting in on auto shop class, attending car shows-Best explores the fast-paced world of kids and their cars. She reveals a world where cars have incredible significance for kids today, as a means of transportation and thereby freedom to come and go, as status symbols and as a means to express their identities. But while having a fast car or a cool ride can carry tremendous importance for these kids, Best shows that the price, especially when it can cost $30,000, can be steep as working-class kids work jobs to make car payments and as college kids forgo moving out of Mom and Dad's house because they can't pay for rent, car payments, and car insurance. Fast Cars, Cool Rides offers a rare and rich portrait of the complex and surprising roles cars can play in the lives of young Americans. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a cool ride.
In this timely and insightful book, award-winning sociologist Murray Milner tries to understand why teenagers behave the way they do. Drawing upon two years of intensive fieldwork in one high school and 300 written interviews about high schools across the country, he argues that consumer culture has greatly impacted the way our youth relate to one another and understand themselves and society. He also suggests that the status systems in high schools are in and of themselves an important contributing factor to the creation and maintenance of consumer capitalism explaining the importance of designer jeans and designer drugs in an effort to be the coolest kid in the class.
In an adult-dominated society, teenagers are often shut out of participation in politics. We Fight to Win offers a compelling account of young people's attempts to get involved in community politics, and documents the battles waged to form youth movements and create social change in schools and neighborhoods.Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two very different youth movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California. She examines how these young activists navigate schools, families, community organizations, and the mainstream media, and employ a variety of strategies to make their voices heard on some of today's most pressing issuesùwar, school funding, the environmental crisis, the prison industrial complex, standardized testing, corporate accountability, and educational reform. We Fight to Win is one of the first books to focus on adolescence and political action and deftly explore the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender.
Is civic identity in the United States really defined by liberal, democratic political principles? Or is U.S. citizenship the product of multiple traditions -- not only liberalism and republicanism but also white supremacy, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, Protestant supremacy, and male Supremacy? In this powerful and disturbing book, Rogers Smith traces political struggles over U.S. citizenship laws from the colonial period through the Progressive era and shows that throughout this time, most adults were legally denied access to full citizenship, including political rights, solely because of their race, ethnicity, or gender. Basic conflicts over these denials have driven political development and civic membership in the U.S., Smith argues. These conflicts are what truly define U.S. civic identity up to this day. Others have claimed that nativist, racist, and sexist traditions have been marginal or that they are purely products of capitalist institutions. In contrast, Smith's pathbreaking account explains why these traditions have been central to American political and economic life. He shows that in the politics of nation building, principles of democracy and liberty have often failed to foster a sense of shared "peoplehood" and have instead led many Americans to claim that they are a "chosen people", a "master race" or superior culture, with distinctive gender roles. Smith concludes that today the United States is in a period of reaction against the egalitarian civic reforms of the last generation, with nativist, racist, and sexist beliefs regaining influence. He suggests ways that proponents of liberal democracy should alter their view of U.S. citizenship in order to combat thesedevelopments more effectively. "An important and original argument that ranges through a long period of American history and makes a major contribution to the debate about the bases of American nationality and civic identity". -- Eric Foner, Columbia University.
Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children. The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.
As one of the most prestigious high schools in the nation, St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, has long been the exclusive domain of America's wealthiest sons. But times have changed. Today, a new elite of boys and girls is being molded at St. Paul's, one that reflects the hope of openness but also the persistence of inequality. In Privilege, Shamus Khan returns to his alma mater to provide an inside look at an institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the past 150 years. He shows that St. Paul's students continue to learn what they always have--how to embody privilege. Yet, while students once leveraged the trappings of upper-class entitlement, family connections, and high culture, current St. Paul's students learn to succeed in a more diverse environment. To be the future leaders of a more democratic world, they must be at ease with everything from highbrow art to everyday life--from Beowulf to Jaws--and view hierarchies as ladders to scale. Through deft portrayals of the relationships among students, faculty, and staff, Khan shows how members of the new elite face the opening of society while still preserving the advantages that allow them to rule.
Research on political socialization during the 1950s focused on early precursors of political attitudes and treated children as rather passive participants in the process. A second wave of research in the 1960s considered youth a force creating social change and held that the transition between adolescence and adulthood was a period uniquely suited to examining political issues. Developmental research during the past two decades has emphasized lifelong plasticity and the importance of the sociohistorical contexts in which children grow up. This change in views of development has occurred at a time when populations in all societies are becoming more diverse and when there have been dramatic economic and sociopolitical upheavals throughout the world. Thus there is a renewed importance for research on the political development of young people and the potential for examining this topic in increasingly meaningful ways. This issue highlights a new generation of research in this domain, paying particular attention to international and comparative work and to those studies that bring afresh and developmental approach.
In this article I elaborate and codify the extended case method, which deploys participant observation to locate everyday life in its extralocal and historical context. The extended case method emulates a reflexive model of science that takes as its premise the intersubjectivity of scientist and subject of study. Reflexive science valorizes intervention, process, structuration, and theory reconstruction. It is the Siamese twin of positive science that proscribes reactivity, but upholds reliability, replicability, and representativeness. Positive science, exemplified by survey research, works on the principle of the separation between scientists and the subjects they examine. Positive science is limited by “context effects” (interview, respondent, field, and situational effects) while reflexive science is limited by “power effects” (domination, silencing, objectification, and normalization). The article concludes by considering the implications of having two models of science rather than one, both of which are necessarily flawed. Throughout I use a study of postcolonialism to illustrate both the virtues and the shortcomings of the extended case method.
Methodology can only bring us reflective understanding of the means which have demonstrated their value in practice by raising them to the level of explicit consciousness; it is no more the precondition of fruitful intellectual work than the knowledge of anatomy is the precondition of“correct” walking.
Max Weber— The Methodology of the Social Sciences
We examined the potential benefits and risks associated with participation in five types of activities: prosocial (church and volunteer activities), team sports, school involvement, performing arts, and academic clubs. Our sample included 1,259 mostly European American adolescents (approximately equal numbers of males and females). First, we explore the link between involvement in these activities and our indicators of positive and negative development. Involvement in prosocial activities was linked to positive educational trajectories and low rates of involvement in risky behaviors. In contrast, participation in team sports was linked to positive educational trajectories and to high rates of involvement in one risky behavior, drinking alcohol. Then, we explore two possible mediators of these associations: peer associations and activity-based identity formation. The evidence supported our hypothesis that group differences in peer associations and activity-based identities help explain activity group differences.
The study of youth identity and its formations today is diffuse and widely expansive, charted across a variety of disciplines, including Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Education, History, English, and Cultural Studies. This review essay is largely concerned with youth identity formation as a socially bound process as understood by sociologists. I sketch some of the thematic currents that guide contemporary sociologists’ investigations of youth identity formation as socially constituted process, and some of its exemplars. I highlight two conceptual framings of note: (a) youth identity formation as ‘project’ captured in the concept of ‘identity work’ and (b) youth identity formation as historically contingent phenomenon shaped by changes to the life course and changes in conceptions of the self in late modernity.
This article draws from the experiences and narratives of teenage activists throughout the Americas in order to add a needed dimension, that of peer political socialization, to the larger political and civic socialization literature. The authors argue that although the existing literature emphasizes the roles and responsibilities of adults in shaping young people’s civic capacities, the roles that young people play in socializing each other for political engagement is underexplored. Based on two qualitative studies of teenage activists throughout North and Latin America, the authors argue that teenage activists, who are largely left out of this literature, represent a different process by which youth engage in politics. We use teenagers’ narratives about their own youth-led political socialization to extend the existing theorizing on youth civic engagement, rethink some of its core tenets, and elucidate the roles that young people themselves play in the processes of political socialization.
This article presents the results of an investigation of the following questions: How do low-income African American and Latino youths negotiate the boundaries between school and peer group contexts? Do variable forms of negotiation exist? If so, what are they, and how do they manifest? In addressing these questions, the author posits two arguments that directly challenge the “acting white” thesis. The first is that black and Latino students' academic, cultural, psychological, and social experiences are heterogeneous. This article examines three groups of low-income African American and Latino students who differ in how they believe group members should behave culturally—the cultural mainstreamers, the cultural straddlers, and the noncompliant believers. Second, this article returns to the sociological signification of four dimensions of the phenomenon of (resistance to) acting white and highlights the varied responses of the three groups to the social boundaries that collective identities engender and that status hierarchies in schools produce. Straddlers appear to traverse the boundaries between their ethnic peer groups and school environments best. The analyses are based on a combination of survey and qualitative data that were collected from a series of in-depth individual and group interviews with an interethnic, mixed-gender sample of 68 low-income, African American and Latino youths, aged 13–20.
Youth-adult partnerships are being promoted as a key strategy in community building, yet this aspect of community building has not been empirically researched. Based on data from a range of diverse communities, this study identifies the dimensions that make up the construct of youth-adult partnerships and the conditions affecting the practice of youth-adult partnerships. The value of youth-adult partnerships as a viable strategy for youth development and community building is discussed. The study concludes that changes in the lenses of both research and practice will open new directions for reaping the wisdom of youth-adult partnerships.
Scholars theorize that engaging young people in organizational governance promotes positive youth development and organizational effectiveness. To explore this prediction, the study discussed here, based on interview data from 16 youth and 24 adult organizational leaders representing 8 organizations, mapped the developmental processes that occur when youth and adults share governance responsibilities. It was found that engaging youth in decision making secured the commitment of young people to their organizational communities, and additionally, contributed positively to youth development. Further, the adult leaders reported that the experience of working with youth had a positive effect on their own development and contributed to the overall efficacy of their organizations. These data indicate that organizational governance may offer a viable context through which youth can be active producers of their own development and of the communities in which they interact. Implications for future research and practice are discussed in light of these findings.
Civic competence and obstacles to its development are explored in urban youth. Our review suggests that urban youth lag behind suburban adolescents in civic knowledge and civic participation. These lags may be attributable to low levels of political participation among urban adults, educational failures, and a lack of childhood opportunities to join clubs and teams. A comparison of a small city and a neighboring suburban town illustrates both the intertwined obstacles that confront urban youth on the path to civic development and the difficulty that most urban centers face in improving opportunities for civic development. We conclude that urban youth's genuine interest in acquiring civic competence is frustrated by demographic factors largely outside the control of those living in America's cities.
Death-of-class advocates assert that the United States is moving toward a classless society or that class is no longer a useful concept in the social sciences; however, this paper argues that class is not only a highly salient factor in stratification and inequality but that it also is a compelling force in the lives of elites as they seek to enforce their privileged positions—at least at the local and regional levels—across generations. The ethnographic study reported here documents how privileged women contribute to the maintenance and social reproduction of the upper class through boundary maintenance practices involving residential selection, children's peer groups and schools, elite by-invitation-only social and volunteer organizations, and rites of passage such as the debutante presentation—all of which serve in the macrolevel process of class-based legitimation and the perpetuation of an opportunity structure that benefits the privileged at the expense of non-elites.
This chapter aims to provide insight into conceptualizing and understanding the experience of civic engagement through voluntary service for high school students in the United States today. Unlike prior studies of youth civic life that are predominately quantitative and rely on correlates of youth civic engagement, this qualitative research explores the meanings and rationale youth attribute to being members of their communities. Youth service work emerges in two general forms. Some young people have an altruistic orientation: they are dedicated to help the less fortunate in their communities, but at the same time, they lack strong ideological investment. Other students have an activist orientation: they are committed to activist politics, but cannot connect their political concerns to school-based service. These two orientations to service develop in the context of school programs that encourage – or require – episodic single acts of volunteerism as a form of civic education. Diffuse associational forms and loose, individually based networks thus shape the context and content of youth volunteerism. These associational forms imply the practice of “networked democracy” by young Americans. Although networked associational ties offer young people weaker forms of collective organization, they also allow students to connect to and experiment with many different ideas, issues, and forms of expression.
Although affluent youth can meet people from different social classes and learn about poverty while volunteering, some youth leave volunteer experiences without challenging their class privilege. Using in-depth interviews with forty affluent youth volunteers, the author identifies four ways that youth exercised agency in response to class privilege: evading class, employing equalizing discourses, blaming cultural capital, and challenging class privilege. Because these four strategies both resemble and diverge from strategies used to respond to white privilege, the author argues that discursive responses to privilege are not universal and vary according to the type of privilege being consolidated or challenged. Although positive cross-class interactions were necessary, they were not sufficient to spur youth to challenge class privilege. Youth were more likely to challenge class privilege when they volunteered for long periods of time and completed trainings that identified structural causes of poverty.
This article has 2 purposes. First, it serves as an introduction to the special issue, which provides original research and inquiry that integrate research and practice to advance our knowledge of adolescent development as it occurs in community settings. Second, this article provides an overview of selected challenges facing the field of youth development and offers 4 proposals and content areas in which the agendas of research and practice can come together in an integrated fashion to strengthen communities for youth and adult residents.
Responses from a nationally representative sample of 13,000 high school seniors were analyzed to identify predictors of normative, unconventional, and deviant orientations among youth. Normative orientation was indexed using indicators of conventional political involvement (e. g., voting), religious attendance, and importance of religion. Unconventional orientation was indexed with unconventional political involvement (e. g., boycotting). Deviance was measured through marijuana use. Frequency of community service substantially increased predictability of these variables over and above background characteristics and part-time work involvement. Involvement in most types of school-based extracurricular activities was positively associated with doing service, as was moderate part-time work. Background characteristics of attending Catholic school, being female, having high socioeconomic status, and coming from an intact family also predicted service involvement. Results are discussed in terms of a theory of social-historical identity development, suggesting that community service affords youth a developmental opportunity to partake of traditions that transcend the material moment and existential present.
Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? InMaking Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach.With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth volunteers served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resum s, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult "plug-in" volunteers who, working in after-school programs with a limited amount of time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers.Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations,Making Volunteersillustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.
Purpose – At the turn of the 21st century, popular claimsmakers made a series of claims about the benefits of volunteer work for youth: that volunteering would reduce youthful self-absorption with peer groups, introduce youth to people different from themselves, foster macro-level understandings of social problems, and connect youth to the community. This article examines youths’ experiences of volunteer work in order to determine which claims are realized and how.
Methodology/approach – I conducted in-depth interviews with 45 youth, aged 15–23, who engaged in volunteer work with a wide variety of organizations.
Findings – Youth did not always realize these claims and when they did, many did so through mechanisms different than those suggested by popular claimsmakers.
Research limitations/implications – Because this is an exploratory study which uses a purposive sample, the findings provide direction for future researchers to more fully investigate how youth realize the benefits of volunteering and under what conditions.
Practical implications – In order to make volunteering a valuable experience for as many youth as possible, volunteer coordinators need to be cautious of uncritically absorbing public claims.
Originality/value of paper – Youth speak for themselves about the value of volunteering and challenge popular claims made about youth and volunteerism.
▪ Abstract Understanding racial, ethnic, and immigrant variation in educational achievement and attainment is more important than ever as the U.S. population becomes increasingly diverse. The Census Bureau estimates that in 2000, 34% of all youth aged 15–19 were from minority groups; it estimates that by 2025, this will increase to 46% (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). In addition, approximately one in five school-age children reside in an immigrant family (Zhou 1997, Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco 2001). We provide an overview of recent empirical research on racial, ethnic, and immigrant differences in educational achievement and attainment, and we examine some current theories that attempt to explain these differences. We explore group differences in grades, test scores, course taking, and tracking, especially throughout secondary schooling, and then discuss variation in high school completion, transitions to college, and college completion. We also summarize key theoretical explanations used to explain persist...
This paper, drawn from a book in progress, summarizes evidence of a "civic achievement gap" between non-white, poor, and/or immigrant youth, on the one hand, and white, wealthier, and/or native-born youth, on the other. Young people (and adults) in the former group demonstrate consistently lower levels of civic and political knowledge, skills, positive attitudes, and participation, as compared to their wealthier and white counterparts. As a result, they face serious political disadvantages. (Contains 1 table and 33 endnotes.) [This working paper was produced by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE).]
This article explores U.S. teenage girls' rejections of
“politics,” arguing that for some girls, the refusal to
identify with politics is a discursive strategy informed by their
consciousness of inequality and their commitments to social justice.
Drawing upon interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, I show
how two different groups of girls reflect on their varied experiences of
political marginalization as aged, gendered, racialized, and classed
subjects in order to develop a critique of the practices and policies of
the U.S. government. Building on research on the various and complex
meanings of political disaffection, I argue that defining politics very
narrowly and then distancing oneself from it can be part of an
oppositional political project, and I address myself to the implications
and mechanisms of girls' use of this strategy. a
After decades of neglect, civic education is back on the agenda of po-litical science in the United States. Despite huge increases in the formal educational attainment of the US population during the past 50 years, levels of political knowl-edge have barely budged. Today's college graduates know no more about politics than did high school graduates in 1950. Recent research indicates that levels of political knowledge affect the acceptance of democratic principles, attitudes toward specific issues, and political participation. There is evidence that political participation is in part a positional good and is shaped by relative as well as absolute levels of educational attainment. Contrary to findings from 30 years ago, recent research suggests that tra-ditional classroom-based civic education can significantly raise political knowledge. Service learning—a combination of community-based civic experience and system-atic classroom reflection on that experience—is a promising innovation, but program evaluations have yielded mixed results. Longstanding fears that private schools will not shape democratic citizens are not supported by the evidence.