Young Citizens Facing the Future: Understanding Adolescents’ Civic Engagement in Relation to Their Macrosocial Worries, and Civic Knowledge

Background

As young citizens in an uncertain, complex, and continuously changing world, adolescents have to navigate various societal challenges. Recent studies consistently show that adolescents are worried about the world’s future. So far, the relation between these worries and adolescents’ civic engagement has received scant attention in the literature. This study explores whether civic engagement in adolescence relates to their macrosocial worries (negative expectations about the future of Europe and perceptions of global environmental threats). It aims to increase understanding of individual differences in civic engagement in adolescence. Therefore, we use the concept of citizenship orientations and include civic knowledge in our analysis.

Method

ICCS data from 2,582 eighth-grade students (M_age = 14.1) in the Netherlands were used. Multilevel latent class analysis was used to identify citizenship orientations based on sociopolitical interest, civic participation, and political trust. Perceptions of global environmental threats and negative expectations regarding the future of Europe were included as independent variables, and civic knowledge as moderating variable. We controlled for socioeconomic status, immigration background and gender.

Results

We identified five citizenship orientations: unengaged trustful (45%), occasionally engaged (29%), frequently engaged (16%), unengaged untrustful (5%) and active (5%). The most common pattern was that of adolescents reporting to participate in few civic activities and having little interest in sociopolitical issues, but being trustful towards political institutions: unengaged trustful. Another, small group – unengaged untrustful – showed similarly low levels of participation, but stood out because of the very low scores on trust and on interest. The three other citizenship orientations reflected different patterns of engagement. The small active group stood out because of the very high score on participation. These adolescents participated most in various activities and are interested in social–political issues but had a below-average level of trust.

Our results show that citizenship orientations are differently related to macrosocial worries, and this association is moderated by civic knowledge. Overall, differences were found in the relation between citizenship orientations and adolescents’ negative expectations of the future of Europe and civic knowledge. Moreover, perceptions of global environmental threats were related to citizenship orientations, in interaction with civic knowledge. Together, the findings show that adolescents’ civic knowledge and macrosocial worries can be related to both active engagement as well as being unengaged untrustful.

Conclusion

The different citizenship orientations found in this study support the idea that there are distinctive forms of engagement among young people and show that a person-centered approach helps to understand the complexity and distinctiveness of civic engagement in adolescence. Our study emphasizes the importance of acknowledging adolescents’ macrosocial worries with regard to their civic engagement, thus exploring ways to address and critically engage with these concerns. In many countries, encouraging adolescents to be active members of society is an important educational goal to contribute to a robust democracy. To help achieve that goal, adolescents’ actual concerns about the future should be explicitly addressed.