The Changing Lifeworld of Young People: Risk, Resume-Padding, and Civic Engagement. Circle Working Paper 40

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.]