Background
This project is part of the Youth Activism Project, which is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is part of the Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network. The project is collecting data to understand how participation in online civic engagement differs for participants from more traditional, long-term activist engagements.
Major goals of the project include understanding how youth make decisions about the kinds of online civic engagement in which they will participate, how they perceive online civic engagement versus more traditional forms of activism, and what they believe they are accomplishing through these engagements.
Interviews on Civic Engagement
Summary
There has been little research on how youth make decisions about the kinds of political engagements they will pursue, how they perceive different forms of political engagement, and what they believe they are accomplishing through these engagements. However, campaigns such as Kony 2012 point to the importance of understanding why and how youth become politically engaged. People who are politically engaged throughout the course of their life often become involved when they are young, which means that youth engagement has potentially lifelong effects on civic engagement. As such, understanding youth political engagement is important because it includes the time frame during which enduring patterns of participation in democracy are likely to be ingrained in individuals.
In addition to understanding youth’s broad engagement, we’re also interested in understanding which political activities youth choose to engage in online. For example, online petitions have become very popular. We are interested in understanding youth engagement with those types of online tools and how they perceive these tools versus other forms of civic and political engagement.
Updates on Research
We have published a number of articles using these data, including the following select publications:
Maher, Thomas V., and Jennifer Earl. 2021. “Living Down to Expectations: Age Inequality and Youth Activism.” Research in Political Sociology 28: 215-235. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0895-993520210000028011
Maher, Thomas V., Morgan Johnstonbaugh and Jennifer Earl. 2020. “One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Connecting Views of Activism with Youth Activist Identification.” Mobilization 25 (1): 27–44. https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-25-1-27
Maher, Thomas V. and Jennifer Earl. 2019. “Barrier or Booster? Digital Media, Social Networks, and Youth Micromobilization.” Sociological Perspectives 62(6): 865–883. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121419867697
Maher, Thomas V., and Jennifer Earl. 2017. “Pathways to Contemporary Youth Protest: The Continuing Relevance of Family, Friends, and School for Youth Micromobilization.” Emerald Studies in Media and Communication 14: 55-87.