Adolescent Civic and Political Engagement: Associations Between Domain-Specific Judgments and Behavior

Abstract

Judgments and justifications for different forms of civic involvement and their associations with organized and civic behavior were examined in 312 middle-class primarily White adolescents (M = 17.01 years). Adolescents applied moral, conventional, and personal criteria to distinguish involvement in community service, standard political, social movement, and social gathering activities. Males judged standard political involvement to be more obligatory and important than did females, who judged community service to be more obligatory and important than did males. For each form of civic involvement, greater involvement was associated with more positive judgments and fewer personal justifications. Structural equation modeling indicated that adolescents' judgments about specific types of civic involvement were associated with similar forms of civic behaviors.