Who is the engaged citizen? Correlates of secondary school students’ concepts of good citizenship

ABSTRACT

The opinions about what characterises a good citizen are diverse, yet survey research usually employs variable-centred analytical strategies to examine people’s concepts of good citizenship. The present study builds on a person-centred approach towards good citizenship and validates previously identified types of good citizenship among Australian secondary school students. Following an in-depth characterisation of these types by sociodemographic variables and civic attitudes, this study incorporates multinomial regression analysis to take a closer look at very extreme but practically important patterns. These analyses suggest that students need to believe in the value of civic action to become political enthusiasts and not politically alienated. Civic knowledge may prevent political alienation; however, it is not the ultimate solution as it is negatively correlated with political enthusiasm when controlling for multiple predictors. The results are discussed with respect to their significance for civics and citizenship teaching and learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Active citizenship
• citizenship education
• citizenship norms
• civic knowledge
• civics
• good citizen
• person-centred analysis
• political attitudes
• student participation
• variable-centred analysis

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and a visiting fellowship at The University of Sydney, where most of this research was conducted. The author gratefully acknowledges that this research was conducted while the author was also affiliated with the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories in Bamberg, Germany. He would also like to thank Murray Print and Kerry Kennedy for valuable feedback, and acknowledges that the data used in this publication are sourced from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and are available from ACARA in accordance with its Data Access Protocols.

Notes on contributor

Dr Frank Reichert studied educational science, political science and psychology in Germany and worked in the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and its successor, the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi). He was a visiting fellow and a postdoctoral research associate at the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. Since June 2016, he works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong, and the National Academy of Education, Washington, DC, has selected him to be a 2016 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. His research interests are in the fields of political psychology and youth studies, and in particular relate to civic education, political participation, and civic communication among young people.

Notes

1 “Type” and “group” may be used interchangeably.

2 All analyses reported in the results section have also been conducted for each cohort and can be accessed via the online appendices.

3 The unweighted analytical samples are 6,301 students in 2010 and 5,396 students in 2013, respectively. It is noted that these are slightly reduced subsets of the original NAP-CC samples of 6,409 students in 2010 and 5,478 students in 2013, respectively, owing to a small amount of non-response to the items that measured the importance of conventional and social movement-related citizenship behaviours.

4 Higher values of these measures indicate more positive attitudes towards the respective construct, better skills, or actual participation, respectively (for more details on the measures and standardisation procedures, see Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2011, 2014).

5 These analyses are conducted in SPSS, as these cannot be run in Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2015), which was used to establish the latent classes (see the similar approach by Marsh, Lüdtke, Trautwein, & Morin, 2009) and for multinomial regression analysis.

6 Parental education is an insignificant predictor, but its inclusion causes government schools to be a marginally significant, positive predictor of political alienation (p = .020), and the effect of age on political enthusiasm turns completely insignificant if parental education is controlled for (p = .121). For this reason, marginal significances have been highlighted in Table 8.