Socializing Youth for Citizenship. CIRCLE Working Paper 03

Researchers have theorized that programs to promote positive citizenship should begin with an opportunity for adolescents to participate in civic activities, such as community service or political volunteering. In this report, the authors expand this theoretical perspective by arguing that programs to promote positive citizenship may need to begin by focusing on: social interactions in youths' lives, such as interactions with parents and peers and on the culture in which youth are raised. The authors hypothesize that these informal interactions socialize or "prime" youth to have the motivation and values that subsequently lead to positive citizenship behaviors. To examine their hypothesis, the authors collected data during a period judged to be one which afforded an opportunity to participate in a positive citizenship activity salient to a large percentage of the sample population. The authors conclude that their findings contribute to the field of youth civic engagement by providing more concrete evidence for the unique effects that informal social interactions have on youth, above and beyond previous citizenship engagement, religiosity, parental education, ethnicity and gender. Additionally, the authors conclude that early adolescents who have altruistic values and a motivation to better society are more likely to engage in citizenship activities later in adolescence. More specifically for African American youth, ethnic-related experiences and attitudes that are salient or matter to the youths' self-concepts appear to be important predictors of later citizenship engagement. From this finding, the authors theorize the key component of ethnic socialization to be the salience of the socialization and the subsequent citizenship activity to the youth's self-concept. The results are discussed with regard to program and policy development as well as future research directions. (Contains 1 figure and 6 tables.) [This report was produced by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).]