Civic Resilience in the Age of Polarization and Acceleration: Understanding and Empowering Youth Across Differences and Divides
Overview:
With a $5000 Collaborative Learning Grant from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, YVote/Next Generation Politics has been fortunate to convene civic and youth development researchers and practitioners from Harvard’s Democratic Knowledge Project, Stanford’s Center for Adolescence, and Tufts’ Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development to examine past research and propose new ways for understanding and enhancing positive youth development and resilience research and measurement in order to examine the impacts of current political, economic, and social factors on youth. This research has the potential to make a major contribution to the civic sector, which lacks metrics and research on impact of this kind.
Rationale:
The last five years have been very politically charged, amplified by media and social media. Today’s youth in the U.S. are experiencing several stressors--political, economic, social-- that have not been widely or well researched—and that was BEFORE the pandemic hint. Through this powerful consortium of researchers and our civic learning initiatives, we will create new knowledge that each of us that the broader field can draw upon. This project will also provide input into the newly-funded Extension and Replication of the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development and ongoing funded research at the US Military Academy at West Point. We will produce new measures of civic identity and positive civic engagement through developing and administering an initial survey instrument with participants of Next Generation Politics/YVote--a diverse cross-section of urban youth--and Tufts pre-college Leadership for Social Change.
Learning Objectives:
The last five years have abounded with political and social change with significant ramifications for young people that haven’t been widely or well researched. The collaborators in this project all work with and research civically-oriented young people and have hypotheses about what kinds of experiences and interpersonal qualities are fostering their resilience in fraught times. Through this partnership, we aim to learn from one another’s historic and current work, marrying it with rigorous reflection and analysis about forces at play on adolescents today, in order to:
Update a seminal research study in advance of administering it to a new and more diverse cadre of students
Assess several current civic learning programs that aim to equip young people to be civic change-makers
Inform the program and research work being undertaken by the principals
Create new knowledge for the field more broadly through publication of an article for a mainstream education periodical
Key Learning Areas Addressed:
Agency, Belonging, Building Blocks for Learning, Character Development, Cognitive Development, Empathic Mindset, Equity, Executive Function, Identity Development, Mental Health, Sense of Purpose, Social and Emotional Health, Student Leadership
Initial Findings:
Fresh thinking and preliminary research findings through the cross-pollination of different research traditions, different conceptions of human development and identity, and the blend of qualitative (interviews and observations) and quantitative (survey analysis) methods
The COPE resilience scale was modified for the civic domain to measure civic resilience and demonstrated preliminary evidence of internal reliability. Scores on subscales focused on Active Coping, Hope for the Future, and Positive Reframing relate positively with internal civic efficacy. This suggests that the concept of resilience can help clarify foundations of civic efficacy among young people.
Confirmation that 1) as a field we lack good measures and metrics for civic learning and growth 2) there is fertile ground for digging into ways of expressing how young people are developing as civic beings.
Qualitative findings identify a broader, more diverse base of problems young people identify in society (racism, gender inequality and sexism, climate, housing and access to health care) than were cited in 2011.
Next Steps:
Seeking funding to deepen the work seeded through this initial research investigation based upon promising findings in order to
1) confirm reliability and validity of new civic measures of civic identity, purpose, and resilience
2) broaden the base of young people involved in the initial study
3) examine whether and how civic motivation is retained, strengthened, transferred and/or diminished over time (from age 15-24) and what internal and external factors impact the evolution