Promoting Community and Political Engagement Through Undergraduate Educational Practices: The Role of Identity Formation

Abstract

Relational Developmental Systems (RDS) provided an integrative framework to examine how college students’ intrapersonal attributes, particularly sense of identity in transactions with different educational experiences, were related with self-reported community and political engagement and other intrapersonal dimensions. Students who participated in service learning and community service had more hours of public service, higher valuation of prosocial commitment and political activity, and higher levels of empathy than controls. The added value of integrating these educational experiences with a multi-faceted approach to ethics was reflected in even higher prosocial commitment and empathy scores, and a positive relationship with political activity. Students’ sense of identity was associated with their valuation of prosocial commitment and political activity and level of empathy. These findings provided support for the value of providing educational experiences that motivate students to seek opportunities to put their moral commitments into action and that enable them to take the perspective of others and respond with empathy.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Jay Brandenberger, director of research and graduate student initiatives at the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame and Tara D. Hudson, assistant professor of higher education in the School of Foundations, Leadership & Administration at Kent State University, for their valuable feedback on this manuscript.

Notes

¹ For all reported analyses, we standardized each summed variable by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation in order to facilitate interpretability of the coefficients.

² The GLMM ran for 9,991 iterations after burn-in with a thinning interval of 10, and most variables had the expected effective sample size of 1000.

³ Modeled using MCMCglmm statistical software package for R (Hadfield, 2010). The full model summary is in Table A1 of the Appendix, reporting coefficients (means of the posterior distribution of the outcome variables), 95% credible intervals, effective sample size, and p-values.

⁴ All mediation analyses were conducted using the mediation package for R (Tingley et al., 2014). Models ran with 1500 simulations; 95% BCa confidence intervals are bias corrected and accelerated nonparametric bootstrap confidence intervals (Preacher & Hayes, 2008). We also conducted sensitivity analyses for both preceding mediation models to ascertain whether or not the sequential ignorability assumption was violated and found that results were robust.

⁵ Additionally, sensitivity analyses indicated that the analysis for GEP participants was not robust to violations of the sequential ignorability assumption, although results of the analysis for EIP participants was robust (Imai, Keele, & Yamamoto, 2010). A table of the results and plots of the sensitivity analyses can be found in the Appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Teagle Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Robert J. Thompson

^a

Robert J. Thompson Jr. ([email protected]) is professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.

Amber Díaz Pearson

^b

Amber Díaz Pearson ([email protected]) is a research scholar at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

Suzanne Shanahan

^c

Suzanne Shanahan ([email protected]) is Nannerl O. Keohane Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and associate research professor in the Department of Sociology at Duke University.