The Personal Is Political: Motivations for Diverse College Students' Civic Engagement

• In Event: 43.025 - Exploring Civic Engagement in Postsecondary Education: Multimodal Perspectives From Diverse Students' Experiences

Abstract

Universities are important contexts for the development of civic engagement, offering a variety of opportunities for civic engagement, such as service learning and campus groups (Bowman, 2011; Gurin et al., 2002; Krings et al., 2015). However, in the context of increasingly diverse enrollment in postsecondary education (NCES, 2016), little is known about civic engagement among racial-ethnic minority students, low-income students, non-traditional students, and students enrolled in community colleges. Thus, our study investigates how diverse college students view civic engagement, as well as examining the lived experiences that motivated their engagement.

This study applies Bronfenbrenner’s (1977; 2006) Ecological Model of Human Development, which broadly considers the ever-changing, reciprocal relationship between the individual and the multiple layers of systems (micro-, meso-, exo-, and macrosystems), to examine college student civic engagement. This lens highlights the person-context interactions in proximal contexts over time, which may inform students’ own civic engagement from micro- to macro-systems. Because this framework does not advance a specific hypothesis about how person-context interactions affect civic engagement, we also employ grounded theory to identify specific processes through which civic engagement develops among college students.

Our sample consists of racially-ethnically diverse students attending a four-year university or two-year community college (N = 20). Students were interviewed by one researcher for approximately 60 minutes. Participants were asked questions regarding civic engagement, their motivations, and their institution. To explore students’ civic engagement and interactions with context, grounded theory coding was used to identify emergent themes from the interviews (Saldana, 2016; Strauss & Corbin, 2007) with iterative analysis (Patton, 2002; Srivastava & Hopwood, 2009).

While motivations varied across college students, a prominent theme was that motivations for civic engagement were rooted in student’s lived experiences, including personal relationships (e.g., following a family member’s example, to help family members, or build new friendships) and deeply trying personal challenges (e.g., the loss of a child, recovering from alcoholism, leaving one’s faith community). A secondary theme found that students often downplayed their engagement as “not counting” or expressed cynicism about the political system; in contrast, students’ described involvement in myriad types in civic engagement. These included volunteering with local community organizations, using their education to give back to their communities (e.g., engineering, education), participating in marches, writing a blog on mental health, and caretaking for family members. Future analyses will examine how race-ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and school type influence civic engagement.

This study contributes to the broader literature by describing how college students’ unique lived experiences within their micro-contexts, including social relationships and personal struggles, shape their civic engagement. Further, few students described electoral engagement, suggesting a disconnect between participants’ own civic engagement and broader issues in the macro-system. Efforts to promote civic engagement among college students should shift their focus from more formal civic activities (i.e., voter registration campaigns and get-out-the-vote initiatives) to also include informal forms of civic engagement, and validating civic engagement which emerges from deeply personal lived experiences.

Authors

• Cathy Duarte Gastelum, The University of Arizona

• Maura Shramko, The University of Arizona

• Alexandria Sarissa Pech, University of Arizona

• Andrea Romero, University of Arizona