Adolescent moral motivations for civic engagement: Clues to the political gender gap?

Abstract

This study explored gender differences in moral motivations and civic engagement among adolescents to add to existing explanations for the gender gap in political engagement in the US. We examined moral motivations for civic engagement in a sample of 1578 high school seniors, using a mixed-methods analysis of survey and interview data. Multiple regression confirmed that girls were more civically involved and expressed greater future civic intention. However, analysis of motivations suggested that differences in moral motivations might impact ongoing political development, as girls were more likely to take political action out of desire to help, while boys were more often motivated to act on values. Case studies of two interviewees-one male and one female-were analyzed to examine how civic commitment emerges in the interaction of desire to help, to act on civic values and another moral motivation that emerged in the qualitative analysis-to empower others.Dramatic gender shifts in recent decades have led to an increasingly balanced society, where women are graduating from college at higher rates than men and have attained record numbers in the US workforce. As a result of their increased presence in the public sphere, women have become more civically engaged. However, while the historical impact is significant in terms of getting women out of the house and into civic life, the more contemporary impact is discouraging; women are still not engaging in politics at the same rate as men. Although women are far more likely than men to engage in community service, they are persistently Heather Malin,

Engaged Against the Machine: Institutional and Cultural Racial Discrimination and Racial Identity as Predictors of Activism Orientation among Black Youth

“…Given the inclusion of gender as a covariate, the five participants who did not specify a gender or indicated a nonbinary gender were not included in the regression analyses. Given previous findings that civic and political behaviors are related to gender (e.g., Malin, Tirri, & Liauw, ) and age (e.g., Hope & Jagers, ) we conducted descriptive analyses to investigate bivariate relations and mean gender and age‐group differences among study variables. We then conducted hierarchical regression analyses predicting each type of activism orientation, controlling for corresponding past activism, gender, and age.…”

Civic Purpose: An Integrated Construct for Understanding Civic Development in Adolescence

“…Some interviewees with civic purpose also saw civic action as a way to give voice to or otherwise empower an identity group through role modeling, advocacy, and education [Malin, Tirri, & Liauw, 2015]. Through his involvement in slam poetry, Bryant found that he could use his poet voice to explore social identity and support others in exploring their own social identity issues.…”

Finnish social services students’ perceptions of purpose and helping unknown others

“…Generally, in social services work we should be able to attract people who identify themselves with social services work core values such as the social change mission of the profession (Biggerstaff, 2000). When people have a long-term intention and goal to contribute to matters larger than themselves they are more likely investing in community-and civic-oriented practices to enhance societal development (Malin et al, 2015). And this, in fact, is one of the main aims of social pedagogy: developing people's social responsibility while they pursue their individual goals (Hämäläinen, 2015).…”

“…This prosocial emphasis can be perceived as an aspect of being morally aware of fundamental human value (McBeath and Webb, 2002) and intending to advance the conditions that promote wider communal and societal wellbeing, and not only advancing one's own life conditions. People who have other-focused motives in engaging in civic activities are also more committed toward advancing societal conditions than people who have merely self-focused motives (Malin et al, 2015). Developing societal conditions and all-inclusive community-oriented practices are considered important aspects of social pedagogy (Hämäläinen, 2015;Social Services Curriculum, 2019).…”