Civic Measurement Models: Tapping Adolescents' Civic Engagement. CIRCLE Working Paper 55

The goal of this project was to produce a set of civic measures with sound psychometric properties appropriate for use with young people ages 12-18. Measures selected tap aspects of adolescent civic behaviors, opinions, knowledge, and dispositions. The measures are easy to administer and can be used by educators, staff of community-based organizations, program evaluators, and scholars. The data used to derive the civic measures were gathered from two waves of surveys with 1,924 students ages 12-18 from 88 social studies classes in the Northeastern United States. These data were collected during the 2004 election campaign with the pre-survey occurring 4-6 weeks prior to the election and the post-survey occurring 4-6 weeks after the election. All constructs in the report are based on student self-assessments. It is also important to highlight the future orientation of many of the items in the constructs. Several of the questions ask students to estimate the likelihood that they will engage in various community and political activities after high school. Other items ask students to rate their perceived ability to respond to a hypothetical scenario. The constructs were created by either calculating the mean score of the individual items or by summing the frequency. In this project summary, authors note the psychometric properties of constructs, item stems, response formats and, where appropriate, the sources from which items in scales were derived or adapted. The constructs included in this report were evaluated both for face and measurement validity: constructs were created so as to maximize the meaning of the scale and the statistical reliability. (Contains 2 endnotes and 1 figure.) [This report was produced by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).]