Cohort differences in the development of civic engagement during adolescence. Jeanine Grütter,Marlis Buchmann. Child Development, February 26 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13743
Abstract
Investigating whether changing societal circumstances have altered the development of civic engagement, this study compared developmental changes from mid- to late adolescence (i.e., age 15–18) across two cohorts of representative Swiss samples (born in1991, N = 1258, Mage T1 = 15.30, 54% female, 33% migration background representing diverse ethnicities; born in 2000, N = 930, Mage T1 = 15.32, 51% female; 33% migration background).
Findings from latent multigroup models revealed similar levels in attitudes about social justice in both cohorts, remaining stable over time. Adolescents reported lower levels of political efficacy and informal helping in the cohort born in 2000. Both aspects slightly increased during adolescence. Informal helping had a steeper increase in the 1991 compared to the 2000 cohort, suggesting developmental differences between cohorts.
DISCUSSION
The findings of this study contribute to developmental theory of civic engagement by disentangling developmental changes in various components of civic engagement from changes across historical time. The study not only provides further evidence to the limited longitudinal work on civic development during adolescence, but also allowed for a comparison of development in civic engagement from mid- to late adolescence in two cohorts. It thus contributes to the scarce body of longitudinal cohort studies in this field. Finally, this study was conducted for Switzerland, thus providing rare evidence of cohort differences in the development of civic engagement components during adolescence for a societal context other than the United States.
Cross-cohort consistence in the conceptualization of civic engagement
Based on previous work that included some of the civic components used here (e.g., Grütter & Buchmann, 2021; Metzger et al., 2018; Wray-Lake et al., 2017a), this study assumed that the three components, attitudes toward social justice, informal helping, and political efficacy beliefs, would form a multifaceted construct of civic engagement. Extending this prior work, the findings suggest that civic engagement can be assessed reliably as a multidimensional construct during mid- and late adolescence, even across two cohorts born nearly 10 years apart. The aim was to provide a systematic comparison across multiple components, acknowledging that adolescents born in different time periods might not have the same opportunities to become civically active. Being one of the first studies comparing civic developmental change between different cohorts of adolescents, it was essential to have a measure that captures aspects relevant to adolescents growing up in different time periods (Barber & Ross, 2018). The study established measurement invariance for all components of the multidimensional model of civic engagement, not only across development (i.e., from age 15 to 18) but also across cohorts (i.e., historical time). Thus, observed differences in mean-levels were unlikely to emerge because of changes in how specific items related to the underlying construct, nor because of a different understanding of the item content, nor due to assigning different meaning to the rating scale. Importantly, this allowed for a fine-grained analysis of differences in civic engagement between mid- and late adolescence, between adolescents who experienced different historical times, and between developmental change from mid-to late adolescence in two cohorts born 10 years apart.
Although such a multidimensional approach has the advantage of studying different developmental trends in different components of adolescents’ civic engagement, it must be noted that the conceptualization of civic engagement of this study is limited to the three components. To date, there is not yet a consensus for the specific components of civic engagement (e.g., Amnå, 2012; Wray-Lake et al., 2017a) and for each study, there would be more ways to express civic engagement that a single study could capture. Hence, the current findings must be interpreted with regard to the three components under investigation.
Differences in the development of civic engagement: the role of social change and normative developmental change
This study longitudinally examined two adolescent cohorts of the same age range in Switzerland, arguing that they were exposed to different societal environments (i.e., historical time; Twenge et al., 2012). This design helps disentangle developmental change from changes due to cohort effects (i.e., social change). When age is held constant, differences can be ascribed to differences between cohorts (Neundorf & Niemi, 2014). Our findings attest to both, the role of social change and normative developmental trends in the development of civic engagement from mid- to late adolescence.
Normative developmental change in civic engagement
The normative growth hypothesis (Wray-Lake et al., 2014) assumes that, as adolescents show gains in abstract thinking, reasoning skills, perspective taking, autonomy, and identity exploration when growing older, adolescent civic engagement and their precursors exhibit continuous, gradual upward change. Based on this assumption and limited previous findings of a normative developmental increase in civic engagement (e.g., Grütter & Buchmann, 2021; Wray-Lake et al., 2014, 2017a; Zaff et al., 2011), we expected growth in all three components of civic engagement. The results only partially supported this assumption: While informal helping and political efficacy beliefs significantly increased in both cohorts from age 15 to 18, there was no developmental increase in attitudes about social justice. For informal helping and political efficacy beliefs, our findings provide additional evidence from a new context (i.e., Switzerland) that increases in these two components of civic engagement may increase in concert with normative developmental changes in other areas (see above) across adolescence. Concerning such normative precursors, more longitudinal research capturing a wider age range and focusing on specific developmental competencies of civic engagement could provide additional insights.
Regarding developmental changes in attitudes about social justice, findings have been inconsistent and may differ depending on the specific aspect under consideration, such as adolescents’ understanding or reasoning about social inequalities. Across adolescence, individuals increasingly consider structural obstacles as barriers to social justice and develop a more complex understanding of poverty (Flanagan et al., 2014); however, important developmental steps may already occur at earlier phases of adolescence. For example, recent research shows that early adolescents perceived lower social inequalities and were less likely to prefer egalitarian societies as compared to mid- and late adolescents (Barreiro et al., 2019). As the current study was limited to adolescents’ perceived importance of social justice, future work would benefit from a more systematic investigation of adolescents’ developing understanding and evaluation of social justice from early to late adolescence.
Cohort differences in civic engagement in mid-adolescence
Based on an extensive literature review on changes in the social context from the 1990s to 2018, we derived specific assumptions on how these changes might be reflected in cohort differences in civic engagement. Regarding mid-adolescence, we assumed higher levels of attitudes about social justice, lower levels of informal helping, and either lower or higher levels of political efficacy beliefs in the more recent as compared to the earlier cohort.
Contrary to our expectations, there were no cohort differences with regard to attitudes about social justice. Youth were equally concerned with issues of social justice in 1991 and 2000, whereby this finding is in line with previous work pointing to stable political attitudes across generations of young adults (Jennings & Stoker, 2004). However, it contrasts recent work, showing that adolescents in Switzerland increased their support for racial and ethnic diversity (Barber & Ross, 2018). It must be noted that, although the measure of the current study included fair and equal treatment of others, it also focused on a fair distribution of wealth. As previously explained, attitudes about social justice are itself a multifaceted construct (e.g., Ruck et al., 2019), whereby different aspects may show different patterns of change (Barber & Ross, 2018). Moreover, on the basis of low general inequality in Switzerland, recent changes in income distributions may be less salient to youth and may not result in changes of perceived inequality. Compared to other European countries, Swiss adults were less skeptical of inequalities (Niehues, 2014).
For informal helping, the mean levels were significantly lower in the more recent cohort. This finding aligned with our assumptions that social change toward postponement of adult roles and an increasingly individualized culture may have deflected adolescents in the more recent cohort from communal values, such as helping others (Golder et al., 2020). The changing developmental context for civic engagement in Switzerland has been pronounced in the realm of the changing structure of the life course with the postponement of adult roles in the private sphere of life in particular (i.e., marriage and childbirth) (Federal Statistical Office, 2020; Rausa, 2016).
Lastly, the significantly lower mean level of political efficacy beliefs in the more recent cohort supports the competing hypothesis stating that online disinformation due to the strong increase in social media consumption and concomitant decrease in information gathering from the classic and more credible media would undercut political transparency and thus erode political efficacy beliefs. Findings for media consumption trends (2010 to 2020) among 12- to 19-year-old adolescents in Switzerland confirm this pattern of media usage (Bernath et al., 2020). The alternative hypothesis that growing opportunities for participatory politics empowered by social media would give a boost to political efficacy beliefs of adolescents in the recent cohort is thus eclipsed.
Social change in the development of civic engagement during adolescence
A key element of the present study was to test whether developmental change in the three components of civic engagement from mid- to late adolescence was significantly different across cohorts. Thus, an important contribution of this study was to investigate whether social change would be associated with change patterns across later adolescence. Importantly, we assumed that the increase for attitudes about social justice would be steeper in the more recent cohort, while it would be flatter for informal helping. Concerning political efficacy beliefs, the competing hypotheses assumed either steeper or flatter increase. While there were no significant differences for attitudes about social justice and not enough evidence for significant developmental differences in political efficacy beliefs, the findings supported the assumption of a flatter increase in informal helping in the more recent cohort.
Previous cohort comparisons on similar components like informal helping focused on the transition to adulthood, studying historical changes in the development of community service (Wray-Lake et al., 2017b) or membership in voluntary organizations and volunteer work (Jennings & Stoker, 2004). The findings of these two studies showed developmental declines for all cohorts from late adolescence to early adulthood, explaining this decline by opportunity structures provided by educational institutions, which no longer hold after completing education (Jennings & Stoker, 2004). Additionally, the findings were embedded in explanations of delayed transition into adulthood (Wray-Lake et al., 2017b).
The current study extends these scarce previous findings by focusing on an earlier developmental phase and by examining a form of volunteering more readily available to adolescents (i.e., informal helping). Focusing on adolescents, we assumed that anticipated changes in the timing of adult life roles would be associated with developmental changes in civic engagement. A potential explanation for the flatter increase in informal helping in the more recent cohort may thus stem from adolescents’ anticipation of the prolonged period of adolescence when issues related to educational attainment or romantic relationships could be more salient in the more recent compared to the earlier cohort. In addition, a more individualized culture may promote increasing concern for the self, likely to manifest itself in a propensity toward self-centeredness. Such a shift may have lowered the importance of communal engagement during adolescence, thus resulting in a flatter increase in informal helping from mid- to late adolescence in the more recent cohort.
Taken together, these results suggest that developmental change in civic components across cohorts may be partly related to social change. However, developmental differences between cohorts applied to informal helping only. Future research may thus compare longer periods between cohorts to provide an integral picture on social change in civic development that contributes to developmental changes above and beyond normative age effects.
Demographic differences in civic engagement between cohorts
The covariates revealed some interesting differences between the two cohorts. First, while boys at age 15 expressed lower levels of informal helping in the earlier cohort than girls, there was no such difference in the more recent cohort. Previous work (e.g., van der Graaff et al., 2018) pointed to gender differences in prosocial behavior and discussed gender-specific socialization processes that may foster prosocial development in girls (e.g., showing nurturance and caring). Thus, prosocial actions may be more consistent with gender stereotypes for girls than for boys. With regard to differences between cohorts, this trend may have become weaker as a consequence of increasing considerations for gender equality in European countries, including Switzerland (Barber & Ross, 2018).
In addition, adolescents with a migration background expressed higher levels in attitudes about social justice in the more recent cohort at age 15, while this was not the case for the earlier cohort. As these attitudes reflected desire for egalitarian treatment in this study, this finding aligns with recent work on critical consciousness, assuming that this component may be higher for marginalized adolescents (Heberle et al., 2020). As some groups with migration background face higher educational disadvantages in Switzerland (OECD, 2019a) and as the discourse on social justice has become more salient in Swiss schools (Biedermann et al., 2009), these adolescents’ desire for social justice may have become more salient. Future research may shed more light on specific mechanisms that could explain these findings.
Limitations
As noted, this study cannot make any causal assumptions about how differences in the three civic engagement components relate to facets of social change; instead, we describe changes that might correlate with these differences. To pinpoint the role of social change aspects for cohort differences in the development of civic engagement across adolescence, future studies could travel the challenging avenue of cross-national comparison. This requires cross-country availability of reliable and valid measures of the social change features of interest. Selecting countries differing in these features and including appropriate controls for confounders, such studies would help understand how societal circumstances are related to civic engagement development in adolescence. They would be demanding, as comparable measures of civic engagement components across countries were required as well.
In addition to the macro-level changes, there may also be more proximal influences on adolescent civic development, not discussed in this work (e.g., peers, parents, teachers; e.g., Wray-Lake & Sloper, 2016). Thus, future work could investigate whether societal changes would be reflected in changes in the more proximal social context, ultimately affecting civic development. For example, changes in the political discourse and parent initiatives could influence whether schools adopt more democratic and participatory school climates, positively predicting civic engagement (Torney-Purta et al., 2008). As outlined in the ecological theory by Bronfenbrenner (2005) and the relational developmental systems metatheory (Lerner et al., 2014), adolescents are not simply exposed to their social context, but also seek different contexts and contribute to their changes. To analyze such complex dynamic systems and generalize findings across contexts, longitudinal data on civic development from multiple social contexts and cohorts are needed with assumptions on broad indicators of civic engagement in order to capture specific developments and changes.
Regarding the developmental change investigated, we only focused on mean-differences and thus cannot make assumptions about variation in civic development, whereby recent work highlighted different trajectories in civic development during adolescence (e.g., Wray-Lake & Shubert, 2019; Zaff et al., 2011). For testing such assumptions, we would need more than two measurements in each cohort, which would also enable us to look at different patterns of change in different cohorts. Relatedly, more cohorts would help control for potential confounders between cohort and period effects (i.e., specific events that may have transpired in these particular years and shaped adolescents’ civic engagement). Lastly, our measure of informal helping only consisted of two items that were based on adolescents’ self-reports. Here, our findings would need to be replicated with a more comprehensive measure, which ideally also included additional assessments from peers, parents, or teachers.
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