Search

Despite a growing understanding about civic development, we know little about whether the developmental course of civic engagement is the same across different types of civic engagement or different groups of youth. To advance developmental science in this area, we documented age-related change in community service, political interest, electoral participation, and political voice across the transition to adulthood by race/ethnicity, parent education, gender, and their interactions. National multicohort probability samples of U.S. high school seniors from the Monitoring the Future study were assessed at baseline (age 18) and followed longitudinally via self-administered mail surveys across 6 follow-up waves to age 29/30. Of the sample (N = 12,557), 51.0% were women, 11.0% were Black, 7.0% were Latinx, 2.3% were Asian, and 75.4% were White. Community service decreased from age 18 to 24, then showed modest recovery. Political interest, electoral participation, and political voice increased steadily from 18 to 24 and less steeply thereafter. Intercepts and (to some extent) slopes varied by race/ethnicity, parent education, gender, and intersections of these factors. Black youth started and remained highest in community service and showed more accelerated growth in political interest and electoral participation. Young women reported higher community service, whereas gender gaps in political engagement trajectories favored young men. Black and Latinx young women stood out as having distinct civic trajectories. The role of parent education varied by race/ethnicity and gender. Diverse civic pathways advance theoretical understanding of civic development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

This article examines effects of political party affiliation on U.S. young adults’ political participation across age and historical time. Using national U.S. longitudinal Monitoring the Future data from youth aged 18 to 30 years, we estimate effects of partisanship (Democrat, Republican, Other) on change in youth’s electoral and political voice participation with age, and test whether effects differ between 1976 and 2003. Political engagement and partisanship declined for young adults over several decades. Partisanship had a consistent positive effect on electoral participation across age and cohort. Democratic youth were higher on nonelectoral participation for some cohorts, and Democrats and Republican youth showed growth in nonelectoral participation at different historical moments. Although younger cohorts of Americans are less politically engaged based on available measures, political parties still remain a powerful force for political participation among those who choose to affiliate. Youth’s partisan attachments and political behavior are best understood in historical context.

Ill conditioning of covariance and weight matrices used in structural equation modeling (SEM) is a possible source of inadequate performance of SEM statistics in nonasymptotic samples. A maximum a posteriori (MAP) covariance matrix is proposed for weight matrix regularization in normal theory generalized least squares (GLS) estimation. Maximum likelihood (ML), GLS, and regularized GLS test statistics (RGLS and rGLS) are studied by simulation in a 15-variable, 3-factor model with 15 levels of sample size varying from 60 to 100,000. A key result showed that in terms of nominal rejection rates, RGLS outperformed ML at all sample sizes below 500, and GLS at most sample sizes below 500. In larger samples, their performance was equivalent. The second regularization methodology (rGLS) performed well asymptotically, but poorly in small samples. Regularization in SEM deserves further study.

To inform public health recommendations for adolescent sleep, the amounts of sleep associated with the highest levels of academic achievement and mental health were examined. The degree to which daily variability in sleep duration represents an under-appreciated but functionally-significant sleep behavior also was tested. A total of 421 adolescents (M(age) = 15.03 years) with Mexican American backgrounds reported nightly sleep times for two-weeks; approximately 80% repeated the same protocol one year later. Multilevel modeling indicated that the amount of sleep associated with the lowest levels of internalizing and externalizing symptoms was more than one hour greater than the amount associated with the highest levels of academic performance. Greater daily variability in sleep duration predicted greater symptomatology and mixed academic outcomes.