Developing Civic Engagement: Social, Cognitive, Cultural, and Contextual Contributors across Childhood and Adolescence

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Civic engagement, active involvement in issues of public concern, is vital for democracy and helps promote healthy and vibrant communities. However, how children and youth acquire a sense of civic engagement is not well understood. The goal of this project is to investigate how multiple types of civic engagement develop from childhood through adolescence. The study will track whether and how youth become civically engaged over time. The project will explore how civic engagement relates to other developing capacities and to the family, school, and geographical contexts in which youth are developing. Greater understanding of the developmental foundations underlying civic engagement may contribute to better informed and more involved citizens, and has the potential to directly impact public policy and educational practice. Drawing on relational developmental systems theory, this project will: (i) document distinct patterns of change in different types of civic engagement across childhood and adolescence, (ii) investigate associations between developmental change in youth cognitive, emotional, and social developmental competencies and trajectories of youth civic engagement, (iii) test associations between youths' family, school, and organized activity ecological assets and youth civic engagement, and (iv) examine sequential pathways among ecological assets, developmental competencies, and youth civic engagement to better understand how they unfold over time. This project will add two longitudinal follow-ups to an ongoing study of 2,500 ethnically and socioeconomically diverse youth in grades 4-12 from three geographic areas of the United States. Youth will complete comprehensive surveys assessing ecological assets (parents, school, organized activities), developmental competencies (cognitive, emotional, social), and civic engagement (volunteering, political behavior, political beliefs, social responsibility values, informal helping, civic skills, environmental behavior). Statistical models will test longitudinal and bidirectional associations using latent growth curve and longitudinal structural models. Findings will contribute to a comprehensive theory of youth civic development that describes how and why civic engagement changes across childhood and adolescence.