Studying Youth Sociopolitical Development Through Social Network Theory

• In Event: 52.035 - Contemporary Youth Activism: Advancing Social Justice in the United States

Abstract

Youth-led Participatory Action Research (YPAR) has emerged as a research practice employed by schools, community organizations, and youth organizing/activism groups to empower youth to address social and political issues in their communities (Berg, Coman, & Schensul, 2009; Ozer, Ritterman, & Wanis, 2010). While some research exists on the outcomes of YPAR initiatives in terms of learning and community development, there is less information about the ways in which the social networks that students develop shape their learning and ideologies (Langhout, Collins, & Ellison, 2013). This paper presents a study of how relationships that youth built with various allies in one YPAR program influenced their development of critical consciousness.

The study used the Socio-Political Development (SPD) framework (Watts, Griffith, & Abdul-Adil, 1999; Watts & Guessous, 2006) as a theoretical framework to describe critical consciousness development. The SPD stages include: acritical (believing the world is just), adaptive (distanced awareness of inequities), pre-critical (avoiding conflict/difference), critical (questioning inequities), and liberatory (actively working for equity/justice). Furthermore, Social Network Theory (Lin, 2001) was used as an analytic lens to describe the networking characteristics of participants.

The study focused on the experiences of a cohort of ten 10th-grade youth in a YPAR program structured as an intense week-long summer workshop and monthly meetings throughout the school year. The program was run by a university-based community partnership program and was located in a mid-size Mid-Atlantic city with a high Hispanic population (80%) and high poverty (incomes 12% below the national average). The youth participants reflected these demographics. During the summer, guests, such as adult community leaders, youth activists from local youth-led organizations, university faculty and administrators, and undergraduate students were invited to meet with and work with the youth to help them learn about community issues and support their YPAR project work. Data was used from youth interviews, observations of the program activities, youth reflection journals, and interviews with three undergraduate program assistants.

Results from the analysis of the data showed that program youths’ networking characteristics and relationships with four key groups (adults, visiting youth organizers, undergraduates, and program peers) were dissimilar, and had different effects on youths’ sociopolitical development. When youth networked with adult mentors, they rarely made close connections, and their life experiences were very different from those of many of the adults. The adults helped them to envision future possibilities and a sense of responsibility to the world but did not push them beyond the adaptive stage of sociopolitical development. Likewise, while the youths had more in common with undergraduates, who often helped to broker understandings between youths and adults, youth sociopolitical development remained in the adaptive and precritical stages through their interactions with these groups. The network homophily and dense ties developed by the youth organizers and program peers catalyzed youth in the program to move into the critical and liberatory statuses of the sociopolitical development spectrum. The findings from this study have implications for YPAR practitioners about how to how to be strategic in seeking collaborative partnerships to support youths’ sociopolitical understanding.

Author

• Kira J. Baker-Doyle, Arcadia University