Download The Effects of Youth and Adolescent Involvement on Value Patterns

Dietlind Stolle
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
[email protected]
Marc Hooghe
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
[email protected]
Preparing for the Learning School of Democracy
The Effects of Youth and Adolescent Involvement
on Value Patterns and Participation in Adult Life
ECPR Joint Sessions 2002
Turin, 22-27 March 2002
1. Introduction
The recent literature on social capital has demonstrated successfully that networks of civic
engagement, generalized trust and norms of reciprocity within a society have beneficial
effects on the functioning of political institutions, individual well-being and even economic
growth. However, we know less about how these kinds of attitudes and behaviours might be
generated. While institution-centred accounts focus on the role of government institutions
and policy effects (Braithwaite and Levi 1998; Skocpol 1999; Rothstein & Stolle
forthcoming), society-centred approaches see frequent social interaction as a prerequisite for
the creation of generalized trust and reciprocity (Putnam 2000). The logic of society-centred
approaches implies that associations fulfil a socialization function: because of their
interaction in voluntary associations and related experiences of co-operation, members are
socialised into a more democratic and more trusting value pattern.
Yet, the empirical research does not fully support this assumption. Although people who are
members of associations are usually more trusting and tolerant, so far no one has
convincingly demonstrated that the social participation experience has an independent effect
on civic attitudes. Proving causality ideally requires longitudinal research, which would
allow us to follow the development of value patterns of individuals over time.
When we look at the literature on political socialization, however, this lack of empirical
confirmation becomes understandable. This kind of research demonstrates that socialization
effects tend to be more limited in scope during one’s adult life and it suggests that the
adherence to core values and identities is relatively stable during the life cycle (Uslaner
2002). Of course changes in attitudes do occur during adulthood (Sigel 1989a), partly as a
result of job experiences (Kohn & Schooler 1982) and family (Lesthaeghe & Moors 2001) or
social experiences, but also as a result of societal changes, but in general these changes do
not interfere with the basic pattern, established early in the life cycle. In sum, the most
powerful socialization experiences occur in the early, formative phases of the life cycle, for
example in the context of family experiences as well as civic education and community
involvement projects for young people. In other words, if we want to detect the occurrence
of socialization effects on democratic and trusting attitudes and behaviours as social capital
research suggests, the more promising strategy would be to focus on young people, and not
on adults.
A growing body of research indeed suggests that political attitudes and behaviours are
shaped early in life, e.g., through socialization within families, schools, peer groups,
community projects but also youth associations (Flanagan & Sherrod 1998; Hahn 1998;
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Niemi & Junn 1998; Oswald & Schmid 1998; Yates & Youniss 1999; Galston 2001;
Torney-Purta et.al. 2001). Working within the ‘political generations’-tradition of Karl
Mannheim, some authors also stress the importance of generation defining events during
adolescence or early adulthood. Most of this literature is confined to the field of family and
education studies, and the insights offered by this line of research are rarely integrated into
the newly emerging area of social capital research or into political participation research.
Longitudinal studies like the Niemi/Jennings socialization research, however, suggest that
participation at a young age does have lasting effects on subsequent political attitudes and
behaviours (Jennings & Niemi 1981). Some authors in this line of research argue that youth
participation strengthens a feeling of political and social efficacy, which is conducive for
adult participation. Other authors state that the networks, which are formed by youth
participation, especially at the local level, can later be used for various mobilization efforts.
Although the causal link needs further specification, it is clear that we cannot develop a full
understanding of adult participation without taking into account the effects of youth
participation and socialization.
The study of adolescents in this context is highly interesting for other reasons too. First, in
recent years several studies have shown that especially among young people’s political
interest and civic participation has been declining dramatically (Rahn & Transue 1995).
Putnam’s findings on falling membership in voluntary associations, declining volunteerism,
political apathy, and rising political and social distrust point to the fact that generational
change might be behind these developments, as a ‘civic generation’ is gradually being
replaced by younger age cohorts, less interested in public affairs (Putnam 2000). Even
though the factors behind generational change are not directly related to the life cycle, the
concern about the “less-participant young generation” certainly urges us to better understand
important youth socialization influences that shape civic attitudes and behaviours.
In this paper, we develop the idea of integrating the insights of studies on youth socialization
into the field of social capital research. Yet previous socialization studies need to be
modified. They focused mainly on the importance of civic education and utilised a fairly
simplistic top-down approach to socialization. Our argument is that adolescent social
interaction and social participation might be more influential learning schools for
democracy. For society-centred social capital approaches this implies that it is time to shift
the focus from the importance attributed to adult participation to the scrutiny of social
interaction patterns and experiences during one’s adolescence. We explore the empirical
links between youth and adult participation, as well as between youth participation and civic
values and attitudes, distinguishing between the structural (mobilization networks) and
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attitudinal causal mechanisms. In this effort, we rely both on an overview of the existing
literature as well as on a secondary analysis of both North American and European research.
Even though we perform important tests of our hypotheses, it will become clear that our data
sources to date cannot fully disentangle the effects of youth experiences on adult civic
attitudes and values. We therefore propose new research projects that can be more successful
in solving this puzzle.
2. Social Interaction as a Source of Social Capital
Society-centred approaches to the study of social capital rely predominantly on the
importance of social interactions and voluntary associations in the manner originally
suggested by Tocqueville. Voluntary associations and other forms of social interactions are
seen as creators of social capital because of their socialization effects on democratic and cooperative values and norms: associations function as “learning schools for democracy.”1 For
example, the settlement houses were often referred to as training grounds for the participants
to shape and influence their social values and further political demands (Putnam
2000:394ff.). Similarly horizontal voluntary associations are thought to have shaped the cooperative spirit of Northern Italians.
The claim is that in areas with stronger, dense, horizontal, and more cross-cutting networks,
there is a spill-over from the membership in organizations to the development of cooperative values and norms that citizens develop. In areas where networks with such
characteristics do not develop, there are fewer opportunities to learn civic virtues and
democratic attitudes, resulting in a lack of trust. At the micro-level, this entails the
relationship between an individual’s membership in associations and networks (structural
aspects of social capital), and an individual’s values and attitudes (cultural aspects of social
capital). So far the social capital school has mainly used membership in voluntary
associations or other types of networks as the indicator of social capital, assuming that such
groups and associations function as a school of democracy, where co-operative values and
trust are easily socialised.2
These insights, however, are confronted with some important problems. First of all,
empirical research routinely finds a significant relation between membership in voluntary
associations and democratic value patterns, but this relation generally is not as strong as is
1 However, associations might also have external effects, as they link citizens to the political process (see
Toqueville (1835) and Putnam (1993)).
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expected in part of the theoretical literature. Second, since most research relies on crosssectional survey material, the direction of causality cannot be established: the observed
relation might as well be the result of self-selection. Third and related, there is no microtheory on the question how participation in voluntary associations or other social interactions
would have these strong effects, compared to other interaction contexts. Furthermore, and
most importantly in the context of our paper, the thesis that interaction within voluntary
associations exerts a strong socialization effect runs counter to some of the basic findings of
the research on political socialization.
Research on the consequences of social participation and associational membership has
indicated a general relationship with civic traits of the participants or members. Most
empirical studies on the effect of voluntary associations show that members of organizations
and associations exhibit more democratic and civic attitudes as well as more active forms of
political participation than non-members. Almond and Verba (1963) already found that
members of associations are more politically active, more informed about politics, more
sanguine about their ability to affect political life, and more supportive of democratic norms
(Billiet and Cambré, 1999; Olsen, 1972; Verba and Nie, 1972). Others have noticed that the
number and type of associations to which people belong, and the extent of their activity
within the organization, are related to political activity and involvement (Rogers, Bultena
and Barb, 1975). In later research, Verba and his colleagues found that members of
voluntary associations learn self-respect, group identity, and public skills (Verba, Schlozman
and Brady, 1995; see also Dekker, Koopmans and van den Broek, 1997; Moyser and Parry,
1997). Similarly, Clemens shows how multiple memberships in women’s organizations and
additional training at the turn of the twentieth century fostered the transfer of civic and
organizational skills and interpersonal ties. This web of formal and informal organizations
provided the backdrop of the women’s suffrage movement (Clemens 1999).
To these findings, the social capital school adds the insight that membership in associations
should also facilitate the learning of co-operative attitudes and behaviour, including
reciprocity. In particular, membership in voluntary associations should increase face-to-face
interactions between people and create a setting for the development of trust. This in-group
trust can be utilized to achieve group purposes more efficiently and more easily.
Furthermore, via mechanisms that are not yet clearly understood, the development of
interpersonal trust and the co-operative experiences between members tends to be generalized
to the society as a whole (Boix and Posner, 1996). In this way, the operation of voluntary
2 Another reason for this approach has been, of course, that indicators of memberships in associations as
opposed to other types of social interactions or attitudinal data have been readily available.
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groups and associations contributes to the building of a society in which co-operation
between all people for all sorts of purposes — not just within the groups themselves — is
facilitated.
The problem with the research to date is that even though individuals who join groups and
who interact with others regularly show attitudinal and behavioural differences compared to
non-joiners, the possibility exists that people self-select into associations and groups,
depending on their original levels of generalized trust and reciprocity. This is a classic
problem of endogeneity. People who trust more might be more easily drawn to membership
in associations, whereas people who trust less might not join in the first place. Ideally one
would track association members over time in order to filter out the separate influence of
group membership on trust, controlling for self-selection effects. However, such longitudinal
data are rarely available, and are time-consuming and costly to collect. Another strategy is to
compare those who are more active with those who are less engaged in associational life.
In order to gain better insights into the relationship between self-selection and
membership effects, Stolle collected a data set sampling non-members and members in
various associations in three countries — Germany, Sweden, and the United States — and
carrying out two comparisons, namely between non-members and members, and between
those who had just joined and those who participated for longer periods. The finding is that
membership does indeed influence trust toward the other group members and personal
engagement within the group, but with regard to generalized trust, the self-selection effects
were more pronounced than the membership effects (Stolle, 2001a). This essentially suggests
that people with higher levels of trust indeed self-select into associations. Other research
confirms that associational membership and the face-to-face interactions do not necessarily
contribute to the development of civic attitudes and values (Claiborn and Martin 2000;
Mayer, forthcoming; Uslaner 2002; Wollebæk and Selle forthcoming). Similar or mixed
results emerge on the effects of associations at the macro level (Herreros and Morales 2000;
Stolle, forthcoming; van der Meer forthcoming). How can we explain these puzzling
findings?
One interesting causal mechanism is suggested by Hooghe (forthcoming). He argues that
membership in associations has incremental and reinforcing effects. In his theoretical
account, socialization effects in associations can occur when the members of an association
converge in a process of value polarisation. In what might be called a cycle of “selection and
adaptation”, members self-select into these kinds of organizations, but subsequently they are
being influenced by the values upheld by their fellow-members. This practically implies that
socialization effects are more prevalent in homogeneous settings where value patterns
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converge more easily, and that they are less pronounced than we sometimes think they are.
So, no wonder some of the research does not find any significant effects, if membership can
only under certain conditions lead to the strengthening of existing values. In fact, the logic of
the argument implies that value patterns are formed much before the actual participation
experience, whereas the membership mainly contributes to the strengthening of existing
values.
The lack of solid empirical evidence for the ‘learning school’ of voluntary associations
might be related to the fact that for adults, membership in organizations and other regular
social contacts are relatively short-lived and happen at a stage in life when important aspects
of the socialization process have already been completed. Given the fact that for most adults,
the participation in voluntary associations takes but a limited amount of their time, it seems
unlikely that the interaction within these associations would have such a strong effect on
their attitudes (Newton 1997). The results of a Belgian survey show that, on average, people
spend some 2h15min a week in voluntary associations, and there is no apparent reason why
this mere two hours would have such a strong influence, taking into consideration that
family life, work hours, informal social life, watching television or school are much more
important in the time budget of most citizens (Hooghe 2001). In retrospect, it indeed seems
unlikely that such strong socialization effects of non-vital events (like the membership of an
association) would be found among adults. In fact within the reference frame of political
socialization studies, we would expect that secondary socialization experiences, i.e.
socialization occurring later in the life cycle, will have a less lasting impact, as they happen
in a later phase of life and most of these experiences are rather short-lived and not
necessarily influential to substantially change or shape people’s attitudes and behaviours.
In review of socialization studies, it might be more plausible that primary
socialization experiences, i.e. those experiences in one’s childhood and adolescence, are
more formative. Although Sigel stresses the importance of experiences in later life, she too
acknowledges: “much of the foundation for political life – affect, cognition, and participation
– is in place as the young person reaches adulthood” (Sigel 1989b, ix). Maybe voluntary
associations do function as learning schools, but in any case it makes sense to look at what is
happening before people enter them, to study how young people pick up participatory habits
and how they acquire their basic outlook toward society at a relatively early age. Or as Paul
Whiteley (1999, 41-42) puts it: “individual values (…) which can only be explained
effectively by socialization processes within the family and in early adulthood experiences,
play a more important role in creating social capital than does face-to-face interaction within
organizations”.
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We therefore suggest that we open up the social capital agenda to the insights of
socialization research. In other words, instead of looking at potentially minor influences in
one’s adult life on civic attitudes and behaviours, we should turn to adolescents because their
social experiences in associational life and similar social contacts might be more influential.
This view suggests that core values of social capital, such as norms of reciprocity and
generalized trust, can be considered as traits that are acquired early in life (Piaget 1932;
Kohlberg 1981), and that remain rather stable throughout one’s lifetime (see more on this
below). This would be specially the case for reciprocity, not only a key element of social
capital, but also one of the central elements of Piaget’s observations on the moral
development of children. According to the classic Piaget studies, the sense of reciprocity is
well established in most children by the age of twelve. By studying respondents at an earlier
age, than social capital studies have done so far, we effectively take up the suggestion by
Niemi and Junn (1998, 157): “If we want to understand what adult citizens know and do not
know about political life, and how they got that way, the late adolescent years and schools
are good places to begin”. However, what are the messages of youth socialization studies so
far?
3. Political socialization—What do we know?
3.1. The Early Literature
Focusing on the socialization effects of experiences early in the life cycle implies that we
return to the field of political socialization, a line of research, which has largely been
abandoned in the past two decades. While in the 1960s and 1970s various studies on this
topic were published, by the time Renshon (1977) brought out his Handbook of Political
Socialization, the field had fallen out of grace as an established line of research. The
assumptions
of
the
early
literature
on
political socialization have indeed become
unacceptable for current standards. Following the lead of authors like Hyman (1959), who
coined the expression, as well as Easton and Dennis (1969), political socialization was seen
as a mechanism to ensure that younger age cohorts adopted and internalised the political
orientations of older generations. The concern was mostly about political and democratic
stability, as is understandable from the perspective of the post-war years. In this sense,
political socialization functioned as a source of diffuse support for the political system.
Indeed, most of the authors in this line of research considered “socialization as a stabilizing
social mechanism” (Schwartz & Schwartz 1975, 4).
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This early socialization school understood the process as a top-down, one-way street:
children and adolescents received clues from their parents and from schools, and they simply
accepted and adopted these standards and orientations: “In general, the picture that tends to
emerge from this research is that of a gradual, continuous process of incremental change
through childhood and adolescence during which the new generation acquires the norms
prevailing within the adult population” (Schwartz & Schwartz 1975, 5). A typical (although
admittedly somewhat far-fetched) example of this approach would be the study Roig and
Billon-Grand (1968) conducted in France in 1963 among 413 school-children between 10
and 14 years of age. Typical questions of their survey included the degree of respect for the
President, the adherence to patriotic feelings and anti-communism, and knowledge about the
French political institutions. The researchers noted that 89 per cent of all pupils correctly
identified “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” as the official motto of the French Republic, while
they also discovered encouraging signs of patriotism among these young citizens: 38 per
cent of all pupils agreed that traitors of the country should be executed, although the
researchers were worried a bit about the lack of patriotic firmness among the girls: only 19
per cent of them favoured the death penalty for traitors, compared to 48 per cent of the boys
(Roig & Billon-Grand 1968, 70). These examples strike us a hopelessly outdated, and now it
would probably be considered unethical to even propose these kinds of answers to ten yearolds, but the interesting finding is nevertheless that even ten year-olds do come up with
consistent answers to these kinds of questions. This would imply that children, at this age,
already have at least some notion of political ideas and concepts, and therefore it would
make sense to study them, as source and effect.
3.2. The Importance of Early Life Events
Interestingly, research on value change and social capital research itself also suggest that the
phase of adolescence is an important one to study. The argument here is that major value
shifts in Western societies are dependent on a mechanism of generational replacement.
Although individual attitudes remain relatively stable throughout the life cycle, at a societal
level, fundamental changes occur as new generations succeed older cohorts with different
value patterns (Inglehart 1997, 51-66). The decline of civic engagement in the United States,
too, has been described as the result of a process of generational replacement: the ‘long civic
generation’, which was raised during the hardship of World War II and subsequent
reconstruction, consistently shows higher participation levels than younger age cohorts,
raised during the affluent 1960s or later decades (Putnam 2000, 247-276). Both in the work
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of Inglehart as in the recent work of Putnam it is assumed that early life experiences have a
strong and enduring impact on the development of social attitudes, and that these attitudes
are relatively stable during the remainder of one’s life cycle. For example, being raised in
economically difficult circumstances is shown to be associated with a more materialistic
outlook, no matter whether life conditions have changed dramatically later on or not. In
Putnam’s view, the experience of external threat in one’s adolescence might have
contributed to the development of feelings of unity that mobilise civic orientations and
behaviours, both of which remain stable throughout one’s life as well.3
Relying on a mechanism of general replacement indeed only makes sense, if we assume that
behavioural and attitudinal patterns tend to be relatively stable during one’s lifecycles. If not,
there would not be any reason to describe an age cohort as a generation, as we would be
unable to identify distinct and long-lasting value influences on a group (generation).
Although Putnam does not explicitly use the concept of political generations, his description
of a long civic generation closely resembles Mannheim’s view. Mannheim states that
political generations are distinct from one another, as a result of important ‘generation
defining’ events, mostly occurring relatively early in the life cycle. The experience of World
War, at a relatively young age, which is used by Putnam to explain the civicness of the ‘long
civic generation’ could be regarded as an generation defining event.
Other studies, too, point to the importance and the persisting effect of these generation
defining events. Doug McAdam (1988) conducted a project among participants of the
Freedom Summer campaign for civil rights in 1964. Most of these participants were
relatively young graduates in 1964. McAdam’s study is very relevant for the discussion,
because to some extent he can control for the phenomenon of selective recruitment. Not only
did he interview the Freedom Summer participants, he also succeeded in assembling a
control group of volunteers, who had offered to join the campaign, but eventually, for some
reason or another, did not participate. This means that the two groups did not differ with
regard to conviction or motivation to participate, since there was no consistent pattern in the
reasons why they eventually didn’t participate. Yet McAdam showed that the two groups
differed significantly with regard to political efficacy and political activity when he reinterviewed them: the participants defined themselves more strongly as leftist liberals,
concerned about ethical issues and civil rights, than the non-participants, notwithstanding the
3 Interestingly, using a similar mechanism, both authors arrive at very different conclusions regarding the level
of civicness in younger generations of today, most probably because Inglehart makes a cross-sectional
comparison, whereas Putnam focuses on longitudinal comparisons in one country. However, the interplay
between materialism/post-materialism and civicness is an interesting field for further examination, see Rahn
and Transue (1998).
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fact that these non-participants too, in 1964 had wanted to join the Freedom Summer
campaign. This finding, too, points in the direction of some form of lasting effect of
participation.
Another example of such generation-defining events would be the tumultuous student revolt
of the mid-1960s, the effects of which are clearly presented in the longitudinal Niemi &
Jennings study. The authors have surveyed a sample of high school students in 1965, with
follow-up interviews in 1973 and 1982. In this last wave of interviews, they still noticed
marked differences between those respondents who had participated in demonstrations
during the 1965-1973 protest era, and those who had not. E.g., even in 1982 the protesters
had higher levels of political knowledge, and they were less likely to respond that politics is
too complex to understand. The research results, however, were not conclusive with regard
to the causal relation: already in the first wave of interviews, which was conducted in 1965,
protesters and non-protesters significantly differed from one another (even though the protest
at that moment had not occurred yet). So in this instance, it seems more likely to assume that
those who were already interested in politics during their teenage years, had a higher chance
to become involved in university protest during the 1965-1973 period. But with regard to the
strength of party identification and the attachment to strong personal convictions, future
protesters did not differ from future non-protesters in 1965, but these differences were
present in 1982. We might speculate that, in this respect, there might a clear causal relation:
participating in protest events can strengthen political motivation and political competence.
For those respondents who have participated in these events, it is probably more attractive to
continue to identify themselves as being progressive or liberal. Jennings (1987, 370)
concludes from this study: “Protesters were somewhat different prior to the protest but
dramatically different afterwards”. These findings too, point to the existence of a selection
and adaptation mechanism: the politically interested liberal students self selected themselves
into the protest, but subsequently they seem to have picked up or strengthened certain values
during the protest.
3.3 The Insights of Current Youth Socialization Studies
The focus of the earlier socialization literature on stability, internalisation of patriotism, and
the acceptance of the existing political structures resulted in the effect that political
socialization studies lost credibility in an academic environment that came to pay more
attention to discontinuities, conflict, contentious politics, etc. Just as unconventional
participation from the 1970s on no longer was considered to be a threat to democratic
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stability (Barnes & Kaase 1979), the rise of younger age groups against the values of their
parents could no longer be seen as an indication for lack of political socialization.
Yet the prevailing mood in the literature on youth socialization in the 1970s and 1980s was
rather sceptical about the possibility to socialize civic attitudes and behaviours. Most studies
in this period focused on the effects of civic education, and the conventional wisdom was
that civic education had little, or very small effects on political attitudes or political
knowledge of pupils (Niemi & Junn 1998, 16; Galston 2001). The seminal study in this
respect has been conducted by Langton and Jennings (1968), and their conclusion
underscored that the effects of civic education “are extremely weak, in most instances
bordering on the trivial” (Langton & Jennings 1968, 858). These results have been certainly
influenced by a focus on formal, classroom-based civic education (Galston 2001: 226), no
wonder Torney, Oppenheim and Farnen (1975) suggested to go beyond the content, to
include how civic education is begin taught, such as the importance of open class room
climate.
Civic education studies were revived again with the publication of the Niemi and Junn
(1998) book, in which the authors base their research on a survey among American
youngsters (NAEP Civic Assessment Study). They emerged much more optimistic about the
importance of civic education than Langton and Jennings three decades earlier. In their
analysis, the participation in civic courses, the recent timing of the courses, the multiplicity
of topics as well as the discussion of current political events had significant effects
particularly on political knowledge, and therefore, they speculate, also on the future
likelihood to vote. Yet these findings for cognitive effects were not replicated for attitudes
(in this case trust in government institutions). They conclude from their study: “one finding
is clear and consistent: school and curriculum have an enduring impact on the development
of civic knowledge in high school students. By enduring, we mean that their effects are
positive, statistically significant, and of meaningful size in comparison to and in the presence
of other competing explanations of civic knowledge, including individual abilities and
interests and home environment” (Niemi & Junn 1998, 142-143, emphasis in original).
At first sight, the findings by Niemi and Junn (1998) seem to contradict those of the earlier
civic education school (Langton and Jennings 1968). There are three reasons, which might
explain the difference between the outcomes of these two research teams. First of all, Niemi
and Junn used a more sophisticated measurement of civic education, taking into account not
only the simple fact whether the pupil had taken these classes, but also the year in which that
was the case, and how many topics had been discussed during these classes, and how many
years had passed since the pupil took these classes. These elements seem to provide a more
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accurate measurement of civic education. Secondly, the 1968 study focused mainly on
attitudes, and in 1998 too, the attitudinal effects were considerably weaker than the cognitive
effects (see for comparable results, Denver & Hands 1990). A third element, which is not
directly mentioned by Niemi and Junn, is that maybe educational practices simply have
changed since the 1960s: the ways in which civic classes are being taught are just not the
same anymore (Yates & Youniss 1999), which might account for the strengthened findings.
There is a tendency to teach civic courses not as much in terms of memory training history
exercises (though also history courses had an effect in Niemi and Junn 1998: 143) but with
more student interaction and debates. Niemi and Junn capture some of the teaching styles
with student evaluations. Civic education indeed has had to respond to the criticism that its
efforts did not produce any enduring effects, and it seems that this had led to the
development of new educational practices. One of the recent inventions is reflected in
service learning.
Although this kind of “compulsory volunteerism” has initially been met with some
scepticism, evaluation studies show that these kinds of experiences can indeed be effective.
About 32% of all public schools in the United States had service learning incorporated into
their curricula by 1998, and several research projects have sprung up to evaluate their effects
(Galston 2001: 229). The finding is that participation experiences at a relatively early age
contribute to the formation of a robust feeling of civic identity, which lasts over long periods
of time, even long after the initial socialization experience (Youniss, McLellan & Yates
1997). Confirming these results, Galston discusses in particular one important study here
that found adolescents’ political/social activities were influenced by their experiences of
service learning in high-school, controlled even for the effects of service performed during
college (Astin et al 1999, cited in Galston 2001).
These findings, however, do not warrant an overly optimistic view about the possibility to
socialise young adolescents into civic traditions: other studies reveal a rather mixed impact,
particularly with regard to educational programs. The study of extracurricular activities is one
example. Smith, who designed a panel study with adolescents of a Florida High School, finds
that one-year participation in extracurricular activities indeed helps to increase political trust
among the participants. However, she recorded negative or no effects with regard to
generalized trust and efficacy (Smith, 1999). Effects on civic attitudes and behaviours seem to
depend on specific project designs and participant characteristics, as well as the extent to
which participants themselves can have a say in the way the program is being conducted
(Smith 1999; Morgan & Streb 2001). In addition, most studies cannot successfully tackle the
challenge of self-selection and pre-existing values and attitudes.
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Reprise
The research on youth socialization so far documents the fact that youthful experiences,
whether at school or in extra curricular activities, can have profound influences on civic
knowledge and to a certain degree on civic attitudes among youngsters. We do observe a
disagreement about which specific elements are most important: the cognitive elements
presented in ‘traditional’ civic education, the hidden curriculum as experienced in the class
room and school climate, or rather the active involvement in all kinds of community projects.
No matter what the precise mechanism involved, it does seem clear that experiences during
adolescence have an effect on knowledge, behaviour and attitudes, notwithstanding the more
pessimistic research results of the 1960s and 1970s. What is also clear from this summary
however, is that most research attention thus far has been directed to mostly what goes on in
schools: even the addition of service/community projects have been mainly school-organized.
It can be argued however, that there is no reason to focus as exclusively on the school
context: other interaction contexts, in which adolescents are involved, might have equally
strong effects. It is our purpose therefore, to shift the attention in the studies of youth
socialization from schools to other interaction settings, e.g., youth associations.
We suggest here that the study of adolescents’ social environments and their involvement in
various forms of social interaction is one of the most promising avenues for socialization
research. Unfortunately, thus far there are only few studies focusing on the effects of nonschool related youth participation and social interaction. The material, which is available,
however, points in the direction of strong and persistent effects of participation in youth
organizations on attitudes, network integration and mobilization. This means that people
who were already active during their adolescence and student years are much more likely to
be targeted by mobilization efforts in their later life (Hanks 1981; Beck & Jennings 1982;
Johnson et.al. 1998).
In sum, since the literature on youth socialization has thus far been fairly limited to the study
of educational goals and school-related civic education, by linking it more explicitly to the
area of adult social participation, and especially the growing literature on social capital,
youth socialization studies can make a new contribution. At the same time, the focus on
youth will further advance our knowledge about the sources of social capital.
13
3.4 Forging the Link: Youth Socialization and Social Capital Studies
How can we use the insights of the youth socialization literature for the improvement of
social capital research? It is self-evident that we no longer assume as in the traditional
socialization literature that children or adolescents are passive recipients of socialization
clues provided by their parents or by the school system. Maybe even the opposite
phenomenon has emerged over time: the rise of autonomous youth cultures have allowed
young people to develop their own value system, partially in opposition to those of their
parents. This does not imply, however, that socialization as such should no longer be
considered a useful concept to think about the way these values are being developed in the
population. It is clear that we have no desire to return to the top-down approach to political
socialization. However, we should ask ourselves whether there hasn’t been a tendency to
throw out the child with the bathwater.
We suggest two ways in which we can adapt the insights of the socialization literature into
social capital research. First, we argue that it is important to re-enact the socialization
literature, but this time with other actors. Surely, civic education and parents do have
important influences on the development of civic attitudes, however, it seems promising to
examine further how peer groups, commercial youth culture or mass media haven taken over
the role of parents and teachers (Adler & Adler 1986). This means that we can expect a
similar process of socialization: young people might adopt the values upheld in their
environment, or at least they react to them. The social capital school has suggested that
social interactions are an important foundation for the development of civic attitudes and
values, and we add that social interactions might be particularly fruitful in adolescent years.
Young people spend considerable amounts of time with each other and in (formal and
informal) groups and associations. The question is which type of socialising and which type
of association membership might be most conducive for the development of civic values and
behaviours that last throughout one’s adult life. We develop some theoretical insights and
empirical evidence for these causal mechanisms below.
Second, while most of the early literature on political socialization saw the process as a oneway, top-down phenomenon, it is clear that socialization should be seen as a more
interactive process. Young people might be influenced by their peer group, but they are
certainly not passive recipients of the information and the role patterns provided by their
peers, and in their turn, they even influence the norms upheld within the group. Socialization
no longer can be seen as vertical process: research convincingly demonstrated that
adolescents and children do not simply adopt the political orientations of their parents
14
(Youniss 1982). This point requires us to examine the various forms of interactive
socialization processes and settings. The findings by the 28 nation IEA study4 on the
importance of an open class-room climate for the development of democratic and civic
values among 14 year olds, indeed demonstrate that its not necessarily the content of civic
classes that is behind the development of civic attitudes, but the character of the setting in
which adolescents spend most of their time might be just as influential (Torney-Purta et.al.
2001). This does not imply that the early 1950s and 1960s research was misguided: it could
be argued that in that period, parental influence and cultural stability were indeed greater
than in the following decades (Hooghe & Jooris 1999).
5. Specifying the Causal Mechanisms: Network and Attitudinal Approaches
So far, we have developed the idea that the study of adolescents’ social interactions might be
an important addition in the social capital literature. As with other research on social
interactions, however, we need to specify the causal mechanism behind this relationship.
How do adolescents’ social interactions, for example, in associations, contribute to the
development of civic attitudes and behaviours in one’s adult life? We specify here two types
of causal mechanisms. The first causal mechanism focuses on networks as a source for
future recruitment. The second causal mechanism explains how associational involvement in
one’s youth contributes to the development of civic attitudes, not only in the youth phase
itself, but also as an enduring feature of one’s personality, which is perpetuated into
adulthood.
5.1 The Network Approach
Mobilization research has shown that having access to pre-existing networks is of crucial
importance for any mobilization campaign to succeed (Freeman 1973). Even if we leave out
any possibility of a socialization effect, we can assume that those who have been active in
the past, are more likely to be integrated in one of these networks. Participation is to some
extent also a self-reinforcing activity: participation generates recruitment networks, which
can be utilised by subsequent mobilization campaigns. The research conducted by Verba and
associates strongly points to the conclusion that having been asked to join a campaign or an
activity is a forceful predictor of participation behaviour. Those who have been active in the
past, have a far greater chance to be targeted by such mobilization efforts: “Requests for
4 . International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).
15
political activity are not random. Those who ask others directly to get involved in politics are
apt to target likely prospects before making appeals” (Verba, Schlozman & Brady 1995,
139). Not only are former members of youth associations structurally embedded in
politicised networks, from the point of view of the mobilizing agent, it is also much more
reasonable to try to mobilize people of whom you know that they already have an activist
history and experience (Verba, Brady & Schlozman 1995; Brady, Schlozman & Verba
1999). It makes no sense to target people with no track record off participation whatsoever,
for any mobilization effort. Movement entrepreneurs will show a distinct tendency to
approach those who have already demonstrated their ability to participate actively in any
kind of collaborative enterprise. Even if we would assume that youth participation does not
have any enduring effects on one’s attitudes (however, see below), those who have been
active in the past, are far more likely to be targeted by any future mobilization appeal.
In his study of the green movements in northern Italy, Diani (1990, 1992) demonstrates that
informal networks still play a very important role for adult voluntary associations.
Recruitment and political alliances do not seem to depend on formal criteria, but rather on
long-established ties of loyalty, ideological agreement and reputation. For example,
militants within a formal voluntary association show a tendency to collaborate with those
whom they consider trustworthy, and the judgement on trustworthiness is often based on
long experiences of joint militancy. Another example of this phenomenon can be found in
the research Hooghe conducted on the Belgian green movement. A lot of the people in
charge of green associations claimed that their involvement with the green movement started
with their membership in the Youth Organization for the Study of Nature, a youth
association organizing all kinds of often adventurous activities, ranging from observations of
bats at night to building nests for storks in Poland during school holidays. As the current
director of the Institute for Nature Preservation testified in one of the interviews: “I have met
a lot of people in the Youth Association, and now some of them have acquired more or less
the same [rather important] position I did. By now, we know each other for twenty or thirty
years. You know I even slept in the same tent as the current director of the Dutch State
Institute for Nature Preservation. That just is a wonderful experience” (interview Eckhart
Kuijken, in Hooghe 1997, 183-84).
5.2 The Attitudinal Approach
The question about the causal mechanism that explains the transmission of values from the
experiences of youth social participation to adult’s civic attitudes and values requires us to
think through a micro-theory of civic attitudes. In other words, which aspects of youth
16
participation or other social interactions are important for learning generalized attitudes? We
need to examine how the membership in youth groups and organizations or other types of
social interaction might be able to influence civic values. Several important hypotheses have
been developed within the framework of social capital theory about specific group
characteristics that might be responsible for the development of generalized values and
norms of reciprocity, which form the basis of our speculations. However, not all the insights
apply equally to research on adolescents.
First and foremost, social capital theory states that face-to-face interactions should be more
productive of civic attitudes than so-called ‘chequebook’ organizations. However, this
hypothesis has not been confirmed with adults (Wollebæk and Selle, forthcoming), yet it
would be interesting to examine whether this holds for the youth context. Face-to-face
contacts are seen as useful socialization experiences because they often entail direct and
positive co-operation experiences. The issue is that adolescents increasingly interact in
imagined communities, whether that be in virtual chat rooms, discussion lists, vis-à-vis webpostings, as members of environmental groups, or participants of rallies and protests. It is
therefore an interesting proposition to see whether the participation in face-to-face youth
associations has more powerful socializing influences than membership in organizations that
do not involve the face-to-face contact. However, it is maybe more important with whom one
experiences face-to-face contacts.
Second, one response to the question of whom one experiences strong knowledge-based
trust with and how this matters for the building of generalized trust focuses on how
experiences of strong in-group trust with individuals representing a broad, rather than
narrow, sampling of society are transferred to citizens of the ‘outside’ world. In this case,
generalized trust involves a leap of faith that the trustworthiness of those one knows can be
broadened to include others whom one does not know. The process of broadening might be
possible because one had good (co-operative) experiences with individuals of different
socio-economic, ethnic and racial backgrounds whom one was not previously well
acquainted.
In the social capital literature, this type of social interaction has been labelled
bridging (Putnam, 1993: 90; 2000), as it brings citizens into contact with people from a
cross-section of society. The implication then is that social interaction and the development
of knowledge-based trust among dissimilar individuals may lead to the development of
more generalized trust, whereas strong knowledge-based or in-group trust among
homogeneous individuals may make it much harder for, and indeed even prevent individuals
from transferring their in-group trust to the outside world. Having these interaction
experiences early in one’s life might be particularly beneficial. The caveat here is that if
17
diversity matters for the socialization of co-operative values, then voluntary associations
might not be the place to look as such groups have been found to be relatively homogeneous
in character (Mutz and Mondak, 1998; Popielarz, 1999). Therefore, social interactions
outside the associational context in schools, neighbourhoods, and other types of social
groups might be an important addition here.
Third, memberships in hierarchical associations, such as hierarchically structured unions or
churches, for example, which do not create mutuality and equality of participation, might not
have the same effect as memberships in horizontal groups (Putnam 1995). The reason is that
relationships within vertical networks, because of their asymmetry, are not able to create
experiences of mutuality and reciprocity to the same extent as relationships in horizontal
networks. So far, none of these hypotheses have been successfully confirmed by empirical
research at the micro-level for the adult population (but see Marschall and Stolle 2002 on the
importance of bridging contacts in the neighbourhood context), but our assumption here is
that these experiences are more formative in the life of adolescents.
To summarize, we expect two different effects from youth participation. First, one might
expect that youth associations offer a good context to create all kinds of networks, which can
be used for recruitment and participation efforts later on in the life cycle. Secondly, we
might expect that youth participation might have a direct effect on attitudes during
adolescence, while we assume that these youthful attitudes tend to be rather stable, and
therefore have an effect on adult attitudes.
6. Data and Methods
Since there is no ideal data set to our knowledge that measures adolescents’ involvement in
various groups, organizations and associations and civic attitudes and network ties
longitudinally, we need to resort to patching our results together from various data sources.
Our strategy is multi-faceted. First, we examine national samples with retrospective
questions on youth involvement, as well as one longitudinal children and youth study in
which questions are asked about the involvement at present in several waves of interviews
with the same respondents. Our most important data source is a Belgian study on
participation and social capital, which was conducted in 1998. The survey consists of 1.341
face-to-face interviews in the 18 to 75 age range and is representative for the population of
the Flemish autonomous region in Belgium. Since this survey also contained questions on
the membership of youth organization during the respondent’s adolescence years, this data
18
set allows us to investigate the relation between youth participation on the one hand, and
adult attitudes and participation levels on the other hand.
In addition we utilize the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY)
conducted by Statistics Canada. This is a very important data set, because the survey has a
longitudinal design and a large sample size. The initial longitudinal cohort is being followed
every two years to age 25; this cohort currently numbers about 15,000. We utilize here the
sample of 10-11 years olds who were first questioned in 1994, because they were the first
group that filled in their own questionnaire. However, the problem with the latter survey is
that the cohorts are still relatively young (the 10/11 year olds are now 14/15 , but they are the
oldest group surveyed in the latest available cycle). Therefore the effects of youth
involvement on adult attitudes and behaviours cannot yet be determined. An additional
problem is that up to now, the NLSCY survey does not contain yet important indicators of
civic attitudes of behaviour. Nevertheless, with the data at hand, we are able to perform some
important preliminary analyses in relations to our questions.
7. Empirical analysis: network formation
Our first expectation therefore is that the networks created by participants in youth
organizations, will also be instrumental in facilitating later mobilization efforts. To test this
hypothesis, we rely on the results of a Belgian survey of the adult population (18-75 years),
in which not only current participation, but also the participation in youth organizations was
documented. In this question, youth was defined as the period between the 6th and the 18th
birthday, while the question also stated that this entailed an active membership of at least a
year.
To start with, the results were impressive: 67 per cent of all respondents indicated that they
had been involved in some kind of youth organizations (Table 1). No other type of
organization can boost such a wide reach among the population, what, by itself, would be a
good reason to include youth associations more systematically in the research on voluntary
associations and social capital. Among the youngest group (18-35 years), however, the
percentage is even higher: 75 per cent of all respondents indicate that they have been
actively involved in youth associations, while this is only 55 per cent for the oldest groups of
respondents. This pattern could be an indication of the fact that the answers to this question
are not completely reliable, but are the result of faulty or fading memories. For someone in
his/her twenties, it is easier to remember youth associations than for a respondent who is
19
seventy years of age. However, a closer analysis of the data shows that the danger that the
answers are being distorted should not be overestimated (Table 1).
Table 1: Former membership of youth organizations for three age categories
18-35y
36-55y
56-75y
Total
Scouts
14.3
13.6
8.8
12.5
Christian org.
43.3
43.0
37.3
41.5
Traditional youth org.
54.2
54.0
43.4
51.2
Youth houses
11.8
13.9
3.4
10.3
Nature groups
3.8
3.0
1.7
2.9
Political groups
2.0
3.4
2.4
2.6
Sports groups
43.6
29.6
14.8
30.3
Other youth groups
9.2
7.1
4.7
7.1
Non-traditional youth
53.6
41.3
21.5
40.0
All youth organizations
75.1
69.0
54.5
67.1
Percentage of all respondents indicating at least one membership in this category. Traditional: scouts+christian,
non-traditional: all others. n: 1341
If the answers were the result of faulty memories, there is not a good reason to expect that
this loss of memory would be selective. Nevertheless: this is what actually happens: while
older respondents do seem to remember their former membership of traditional youth
organizations,
they
clearly
do
not
remember
their
membership
of
non-traditional
organizations. This suggests that the answers rather accurately reflect participation trends:
the non-traditional organizations actually flourished only from the 1970s onwards, while the
traditional organizations (i.e., Scouts and various christian groups) already came into being
from World War I onwards. A typical example on the non-traditional organizations would be
the sports clubs for children, which are a quite recent phenomenon. It is also quite telling
that the highest percentage of positive answers for the youth houses can be found in the 36 to
55 age group, and these ‘alternative’ youth houses indeed had their heyday in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. The historical evidence therefore strongly suggests that these answers are
reliable (or at least as reliable as any other survey question), and therefore do offer an
accurate measurement of the importance of youth participation.
If we want to verify the effect of former youth participation on current levels of
participation, our first step would be to explore the relation between these two participation
variables. To avoid contamination, we have limited this analysis to the respondents who are
over 25 years old, so it is reasonable to expect that they are no longer actively involved in
youth associations. In Table 2, for both former members and former non-members of various
youth associations we report the average number of current active memberships.
20
Table 2: Current active memberships vs. previous involvement in youth associations
Non-members
Members
women
men
all
women
men
all
Scouts
0.81
1.00
0.90
0.85
1.39
1.18
Christian org.
0.63
0.95
0.80
1.04
1.22
1.13
Traditional youth org.
0.62
0.83
0.72
1.02
1.26
1.15
Youth houses
0.77
1.02
0.89
1.21
1.46
1.34
Nature groups
0.81
1.02
0.91
0.94
1.94
1.65
Political groups
0.80
0.99
0.89
1.61
2.73
2.41
Sports groups
0.74
0.90
0.80
1.16
1.37
1.26
Other youth groups
0.78
1.00
0.89
1.08
2.21
1.50
Non-traditional youth
0.70
0.80
0.74
1.08
1.36
1.26
All youth organizations
0.55
0.67
0.59
1.00
1.21
1.12
Entries: number of active current memberships, for respondents aged 25 or more. Population average: 0.94
Our initial hypothesis seems to be confirmed in this bivariate exploration: while those who
have never been a member of a youth association, on average report only 0.6 current
memberships, for the former members this is 1.1, or almost double. What is striking,
however, is that we do not observe any differences between the traditional and the nontraditional organizations. While the traditional organizations are explicitly aimed at character
building or influencing the value patterns of their members, this is not the case for most of
the non-traditional organizations. These explicit goals, however, do not seem to have an
effect on future participation behaviour, which could serve as an indication for the fact that it
is not these explicit goals which have the strongest influence, but rather the latent functions
of youth organizations.
Of course, this relation still does not prove causality or the existence of mobilization
networks. We might still speculate that a kind of self-selection effect occurs, and that those
who were already joiners by the age of ten, have simply kept up this habit during their entire
life. When we look at it in more detail, however, the recruitment function is rather apparent.
For sports, nature and political organizations, we have data on the corresponding youth
organization. For each one of these organizations, it is clear that while their recruitment
among the general population remains limited (except for sports organizations), it is
impressive among those who have already been involved during their youth phase. While
these strong relations might not prove any causal direction, at least they are consistent with
the assumption that youth participation does create strong mobilizing networks (Table 3).
21
Table 3: Recruitment into sports, nature and political organizations
former members of
former non-members of
corresponding youth
corresponding youth
organization
organization
sports organizations
36.8
18.2
nature organizations
25.3
5.6
political organization
42.9
4.5
all
23.5
7.0
5.6
Entries are percentages of former members of resp. youth sport, youth nature and youth political groups, who
are currently members of the corresponding adult organizations. Only respondents older than 25 are included.
The results in Table 3 show, for example, that of all former members of youth sports
associations, 37% are still involved in adult sport groups, whereas among those who haven’t
been a member of a youth sports club, only 18% are currently involved. For politics, the
relation is even more pronounced: more than 40% of those who have been a member of a
political youth club, are still a member of a political party or a political organization, while
among the general population, this is but 6%. No matter what the causal relation involved, it
is clear that youth participation is indeed a very strong predictor for adult participation. This
also becomes clear if we take the step to a multivariate model, with the number of currently
held memberships (both active as passive) as a dependent variable. The zero-order
correlation between current membership and previous participation in youth organizations is
.24, so we can safely use them as resp. dependent and independent variables (Table 4).
Table 4: Explaining current membership status
B (SE B)
Age
.013 (.005)
Gender
-.130 (.111)
Education level
.081 (.021)
Income
.080 (.021)
Time on television
-.079 (.042)
Religious involvement
.706 (.119)
Former youth member
.600 (.121)
Cte.
.361 (.425)
2
adj. r .15
beta
.10***
-.04
.14***
.14***
-.06
.18***
.16***
OLS Regression. Only respodents older than 25, n=1174. Dependent variable: number of current memberships,
both active and passive.
In this regression model, the effect of former membership in youth organizations on current,
adult membership is indeed strong and significant. Even if we assume that youth
organizations do not have any additive effects, this would imply that participation habits are
picked up very early on in the life cycle.
In the next analysis, we introduce a distinction between former membership in traditional
(i.e., the organizations which were already active before World War II) and non-traditional
22
(i.e., new groups, flourishing from the 1960s onwards) youth organizations to see whether
they have a differential impact on later recruitment.
Table 5: Explaining current membership status
current membership
Age
.12***
Gender
-.02
Education level
.14***
Income
.14***
Time on television
-.06
Religious involvement
.19***
Traditional youth org.
.10***
Non-traditional youth
.16***
2
adj. r
.16
OLS Regression. Only resp. older than 25, n=1174. Dependent variable: number of current memberships, both
active and passive. Entries are standardized regression coefficients.
The analysis shows that non-traditional youth organizations have a stronger influence than
the traditional ones. To some extent, this might be a result of the fact that, in general, the
reported membership of non-traditional organizations is more heavily concentrated within
younger groups of respondents, while the membership of traditional organizations is spread
evenly among the entire population. Still, the results are interesting because typically, the
traditional youth organizations emphasize character-building and installing a sense of
community ethos. The figures show, however, that these efforts do not lead to a more
activist adult lifestyle, in comparison with the members of non-traditional organizations.
This would allow us to question the supposedly character-building effects of Scouts and
other traditional youth associations in comparison with other associations. Specific
interaction contexts do make a difference, but these effects do not necessarily result from the
explicit and official goals of an organization.
The fact that former members of non-traditional organizations are more active later in their
life than the members of traditional organizations also point in the direction of a network
explanation. A typical feature of Scouts and Christian youth organizations is that there is no
‘natural’ follow-up organization: somewhere at the age of 20, people leave the scouts, and in
some way or another they find their way into adult associational life. It seems that for some
reasons, a lot of them do not complete this transition. For the non-traditional organizations,
on the other hand, a follow-up organization is at hand. As can be gathered from Table 3:
people belonging to a youth sports club find it easy to simply move along toward an adult
sports club, while for nature and political organizations the same relation hold. This implies
that for these non-traditional organizations, the existing networks can be more easily
23
transposed toward adult associational life, than this is the case for the traditional youth
organizations.
8. Empirical analysis: attitudinal effects
In this section we want to focus on attitudinal effects of adolescent participation. This
requires two distinct steps: our first goal is to test whether the relationship between youth
involvement and youth civic attitudes and behaviours is indeed observable. Our second goal
is to test whether this relationship is mostly temporary or lasting. The latter would imply that
the effects of youth involvement might be observed in adult value patterns. Here again, we
rely on secondary analysis of data that is not ideal, which means that the materials presented
in this section offer but tentative proof of our hypotheses.
First, we focus on the claim that, among young people, participation has an effect on
democratic values. Our first source here would be the IEA study, which was conducted in
1998 among 90.000 14-year olds in 28 countries (Torney-Purta et.al. 2001). A first, and
rather important finding of this study is that even 14 year olds already maintain firmly
established ideas of what is required of a ‘good citizen’: in their view, good citizens not only
take part in elections, but also participate in all forms of public life. In this study, the
children were offered a list of possible characteristics of a “good citizen”. On a 1 to 4 scale
(1 being very unimportant; 4 very important), obeying the law was considered the most
important item (average of 3.65), but followed rather closely by promoting human rights
(3.24), patriotism (3.20) and voting in elections (3.12). The 14 year-olds, however, were less
convinced that good citizens should engage in political discussions (average 2.37) or join
political parties (2.11) (Torney-Purta et.al. 2001, 80). Again, this implies that even among 14
year olds, democratic attitudes are relatively established: “Fourteen-year-olds are already
members of a political culture. They possess concepts of the social and economic
responsibilities of government that largely correspond to those of adults in their societies”
(Torney-Purta et.al. 2001, 70). The study furthermore demonstrates that the participation in
the school council and civic knowledge are significantly related to the intention to vote in
elections, even controlling for the expected years of further education, the literary resources
available at home, classroom climate, the frequency of watching television news and amount
of civic education received (Torney-Purta et.al. 2001, 150).
24
The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth
The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth in Canada’s cycles 1 and 3 are
utilized in order to understand the relationship between adolescents’ social involvement and
civic attitudes and behaviours. The survey contains various items that form two scales that
we employ here: one scale on potential/past informal help provided to others in need, and
another scale on volunteerism.5 Both scales tap important precursors of civic attitudes and
behaviours, and are therefore relatively well-suited for our purposes, even though we do not
have direct measures of trust and reciprocity. Since the data were made available only one
week before the conference, we limit our analysis here to preliminary presentations,
correlations and partial correlations.
Our main independent variable here is the membership in youth clubs and groups, such as
Boy and Girls Scouts,6 and we also include measures of membership in sports groups. The
10/11
year-old
survey
respondents
answered
this
question
in
a
self-administered
questionnaire in 1994. In 1994, more than a quarter of all respondents belonged to an
association such as the Boy or Girl Scouts (Table 7).
Table 7: Membership in Boy and Girls Scouts and similar groups (10/11 year olds)
Categories
Not a member
Member less
Member
Member, who
than once a
attends 1-3
attends 4 or
week
times a week
more times a
week
In % (N=1571) 71.2%
6.4%
19.9%
2.5%
Membership in such groups seems slightly more pervasive of a phenomenon in Canada
compared to Belgium, though our data is not directly comparable, as Table 7 presents an
overview merely of a specific age group of children. However, the variance along this
variable is sufficient for our test on its relationship to the scales of Informal Help and
Volunteering, both of which have been created from the third cycle, data in 1998 (same
respondents). We chose the third cycle for our test, in order to see whether attitudes are
5 The Help scale included the following items: 1) I help others my age who are sick, 2) I offer to help others
with their tasks, 3) I will help someone who has been hurt, 4) I offer to clear up a mess, 5) I will invite
bystanders to join a game, 6) I show sympathy. Factor analysis (principal component analysis) determined one
dimension, and the items created an additive scale with a Cronbach’s alpha of .79. The Volunteerism scale
consists of the following items: 1) Help without pay adopting a cause, 2) helped without pay with fund-raising,
3) Helped without pay in community, 4) Helped without pay in other
activities, 5) Helped neighbors without pay. Again, the items formed one dimension with a factor analysis, and
were added to a scale with Cronbach’s alpha of .55, which falls just within the limits of acceptability.
6 The question was phrased: “Are you a member in clubs such as Boy or Girl Scouts or other such groups?” In
addition, the frequency of attendance of meetings was estimated.
25
lasting. Though how do young people score on these questions? Are youngsters as selfish
and individualistic as the debate on the decline of social capital might lead us to assume?
Only a very low percentage of pupils indicated that they would not help in various
situations, even though we have to admit that the informal help questions might suffer from
social desirability answers. For example, only 12% said that they would never invite
bystanders to join a game, and only about 8% said they would never help others who are
sick, etc. Most pupils answered that they help others sometimes, and about 38%, for
example, said they help others often who are sick. On a scale from 1-3, the average score on
the informal help scale is: 2.2 (st.dev=.41). Volunteering is a bit less pervasive, but also here
only 16% of the sample said that they never volunteer their time without pay, and about 26%
had at least volunteered in one of the mentioned forms. On a scale from 0 to 1, the average
score is here .35 (st.dev=.27). In sum, helpfulness for others and volunteering are not
extremely wide-spread in Canadian youngsters, but there is no sign that children grow up
without any sense of cooperation.
The question now is whether the membership in clubs and groups can in any way predict
future attitudes/behaviours on volunteering and helpfulness. We present our bivariate results
in Table 8.
Table 8: Social Involvement and Helping/Volunteerism: Bivariate Results
Bivariate
Youth Associations and Sport groups no Sport groups with
Correlations
Clubs, such as Boy and coach
coach
/N
Girls Scouts, measured in
1994.
Helping Others
.11***
.03
.03
N=1569
N=1563
N=1562
scale, measured in
1998
Volunteerism Scale,
.13***
.07**
.11***
N=1571
N=1565
N=1564
measured in 1998
Happiness, Item in
.01
.03
.06*
N=1614
N=1608
N=1607
1998
*p<.1; **p<.05; ***P<.001
Table 8 indicates that the previous membership in groups such as Boy and Girl Scouts have
most beneficial and consistent effects on later civic attitudes that relate to cooperation.
Similar effects (though mostly on volunteerism) can be found with membership in sports
groups with or without coaches. The assumption here is that regular training and team spirit
developed in some forms of sport certainly contribute to helping/cooperative attitudes.
However, not every kind of youth involvement has the potential to influence later civic
26
attitudes, and it is important to make more fine-grained distinctions (our data set does not
allow for more distinctions here). In addition, other values such as happiness (or honesty,
results not shown) are not particularly influenced by any of these groups.
Table 9: Social Involvement and Civic Attitudes: Partial Correlations, controlling for
SES of parents, utilizing longitudinal weights
Partial Correlations/
Youth Associations and Sport groups no Sport groups with
N=1359
Clubs, such as Boy and coach
coach
Girls Scouts, measured in
1994.
Helping Others
.07**
.03
.05*
scale, measured in
1998
Volunteerism Scale,
.07**
.10***
.14***
measured in 1998
Happiness, Item in
.02
.00
.06*
1998
*p<.1; **p<.05; ***P<.001
The significance of the results holds also when controlling for the socio-economic resources
of the child’s parents, which is necessary as civic attitudes are certainly also a result of
income and education of the main care-givers. In addition, the results in Table 9 include
longitudinal weights, controlling for the effects of the longitudinal design. SES was
measured along five dimensions, the level of education of both care-givers, the level of
prestige of the occupation of both care-givers, and household income. When controlled, the
correlations for club membership become smaller (r=.07 significant at the p=.008 for clubs),
whereas the correlations for sports groups were strengthened, particularly for volunteerism.
This means that socio-economic resources of parents explain parts of the variance in civic
attitudes of club-goers, but for sports the relationship between parental socio-economic
resources and membership in sports groups must be negative (therefore leading to the
strengthening of the correlation between membership and civic attitudes when socioeconomic resources are controlled). However, we can summarize our results here and state
that groups such as Boy and Girls Scouts as well as sports groups seem particularly useful in
inculcating a sense of cooperative spirit, which is reflected in the results on the two scales of
help and volunteerism. However, future exploration of this data needs to include controls for
current memberships and pre-existing values in order to disentangle the actual and lasting
effects of past membership.
27
The Belgian Participation Survey
The 1998 Belgian study offers an opportunity to investigate another causal link, this time
between youth participation and adult attitudes. This kind of analysis, however, tends to
interfere with the network mechanism we identified earlier: if youth participation has effects
on adult participation, and, in turn we assume this form of participation to have some kind of
socialization effect, it becomes all the more difficult to single out the direct socialization
effect of youth participation. Nevertheless, this is what we try to do in the next analyses,
which are based again on the same 1998 Belgian survey. The dependent variable here is the
likelihood to vote, given the fact that both the Jennings/Niemi study, and the IEA study
suggest that youth participation might have the most powerful effects on political efficacy
and political involvement (Table 10). It should be added however, that this is a bit of an odd
question in the Belgian context, since Belgium is one of the few countries in the world where
voting is obligatory (Hooghe & Pelleriaux 1998). Therefore we inquired whether
respondents would still continue to vote if the legal obligation would be abolished.
Table 10: The Effect of Youth Participation on Likelihood to Vote
B (SE)
Gender
-.18 (.08)
Education
.10 (.02)
Income
.03 (.02)
Time on Television
-.12 (.05)
Watching News on Television
.38 (.08)
Religious Involvement
.11 (.10)
Married
.03 (.09)
Children
-.04 (.03)
Current Memberships
.08 (.02)
Having Been a Member of Youth
.24 (.09)
Association
Constant
43.00 (.25)
2
r
.18
beta
-.06*
.24***
.07
-.07
.14***
.03
.01
-.05
.11***
.08**
OLS Regression, n=1341.
This kind of analysis appears to confirm the results of the McAdam and Jennings/Niemi
studies: youth participation bolsters political efficacy and political involvement: even
controlling for current participation, those who have been a member of a youth association
are still significantly more likely to vote, than those who have not been a member. If we
combine this with the finding from the IEA study that, even among 14 year olds, the moral
obligation to vote, is already a key element of their citizenship concept, this strengthens our
28
case that not only are these concepts shaped early in life, but they also tend to have persistent
effects during the life cycle.
In the next analysis, we again introduce a distinction between traditional and non-traditional
youth organizations, but this time with a measurement scale for a utilitarian conception of
individualism as a dependent variable. This scale, which is mostly based on the work of
Robert Bellah et.al. (1985), captures the rejection of solidarity and reciprocity. A typical
statement for this scale would be: “Looking after your own personal success is more
important than to have a good relation with your fellow men”.
Table 11: Explaining adult individualism
utilitarian individualism
Age
.14***
Gender
-.13***
Education level
-.23***
Income
-.04
Time on television
.10***
Current Membership
-.10**
Religious involvement
-.13***
Traditional youth org.
-.02
Non-traditional youth
-.10***
adj. r2
.24
OLS Regression. Only respondents older than 25, n=1174.
Entries are standardized OLS coefficients.
The striking result of this analysis is that, even controlling for current membership status, the
former membership of at least non-traditional youth organizations significantly relates to
adult attitudes. This would allow us to speculate that the correlation between participation
and attitudes, which could be observed at a relatively early age, is continued throughout the
life cycle.
9. Conclusion: toward a life cycle approach of social capital?
Our paper is an exploration into the role of adolescents’ social participation for adult civic
attitudes and networks, both of which are important dimensions of social capital. Because of
the exploratory character of this paper, we had to rely on secondary analysis of data sets,
which were not collected for this purpose. This implies, e.g., that we did not have access to
uniform concepts or measurement standards. However, even with these limitations in mind,
we were able to perform important tests into the link between youth socialization, attitudes
and networks. First of all, already at a relatively young age, children do seem to have
29
developed fairly elaborated citizenship concepts: they have ideas of what is to be expected of
a good citizen, and some attitudinal dimensions of social capital are already formed. This
implies that it does make sense to study adolescence, and not only in selected contexts, such
as schools, but also the social participation of youngsters. The research of social capital
should be directed not only toward the learning school of democracy, but also to the
kindergarten of democracy. Second, empirically we observe among adolescents a similar
relation between participation and attitudes, as we typically find among adults. Even after
four years of the original participation experience at a relatively young age, the connection
between participation and selected civic attitudes was clearly observable. While this finding,
too, does not offer any proof of causality, it suggests that a participatory pattern is
established early in life. Third, the continuity we observed between youth and adult
participation as well as youth participation and adult attitudes also points in the direction of
relatively stable patterns throughout the life-cycle. We have found evidence that youth
participation affects adults’ civicness through networks and the early formation of attitudes.
Several questions remain unanswered. Better data and models should allow us to
better disentangle the effects that result from pre-existing values and attitudes before the
onset of youth participation, from actual participation effects. Longitudinal data over longer
periods of time would also reveal how lasting the effects of youth socialization are, and how
they compare to other influences, such as civic education, institutional experiences, and
parental up-bringing. Finally, our analysis did not successfully test the attitudinal approach,
since our distinctions between the types of youth social participation were rather limited.
These are important questions that can only be solved with better data collections and
powerful research designs.
However, our analysis of the literature and preliminary findings also have
implications for the research on social capital. Research of this kind will reveal more about
the sources of social capital that are located in one’s adolescence era and therefore also open
up policy options. If social and political participation is indeed not as widespread among the
adult population today, several testable hypotheses emerge from our research. First, it might
be that the problem starts already with youth participation, as fewer citizens participate at an
early age. Second, even with an adequate youth participation experience, it could be that the
network and recruitment function of earlier established networks are more likely to be
interrupted because of higher geographic mobility. Third, the types of networks adolescents
engage in might have changed in character (e.g. too loose, bonding but not bridging, fewer
regular interactions, commercially organized, etc.) so that they are less conducive to the
socialization of civic attitudes in adolescence. These hypotheses might advance our insights
30
into the discussion about the alleged decline of social capital in some parts of the Western
world.
31
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