Teenagers' Conceptions of How People Come to Change Their Minds, Politically

• In Event: Political Adolescents in the Present: Their Ideas, Discourses, and Contexts of Engagement

Abstract

Most research on adolescents’ political development is survey-based and targets content knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and efficacy (Torney-Purta, Amadeo, & Andolina, 2010; Dudley & Gitelson, 2002). By contrast, few studies explore how adolescents engage with each other in meta-political thought and discourse – about how people become political actors, form civic relationships, take or reconsider positions, and understand the political activities of others (Niemi & Klinger, 2012). We address that gap by examining teenagers’ perceptions of and interactions around political behavior, with an emphasis on understanding how people use “political shortcuts” (e.g., worldviews; partisanship; cultural and ethical commitments; trust in political elites) to make decisions about complex political problems. This paper addresses the following question: how do young people think about the ways in which people come to change their minds, politically?

Our qualitative, design-based study (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012) examines 16- to 18-year-olds’ political thinking in two ways. First, it draws from recordings and field notes from co-taught classroom-instructional interventions in three schools – one rural, one suburban, and one urban – in which students contemplated questions about political behavior (e.g., “Are open-minded citizens mythological figures?”). Second, it draws from elicitation tasks (Barton, 2015) in which individuals or pairs respectively were asked to either think aloud through social media exchanges on gun control or rank-order several tweets about immigration policy on two grounds: (1) the credibility of the tweets and their authors; and (2) the extent to which the tweets appealed to partisan divisiveness and polarization. We analyzed the data abductively (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014), which involves generating small-scale hypotheses based on data patterns, and then: (1) juxtaposing them with raw data through follow-up passes intended to evaluate their consistency; and (2) using theory to consider several alternative explanations of those patterns – including the hypothesis at hand – and evaluating the power of the hypothesis via those alternative explanations.

Rather than defining the process of political mind-changing primarily as “flipping positions” on an issue, participants discussed several subtler kinds of change that are more evolutionary than drastic, and that rely on continuous social interactions. Teenagers explicitly identified how such interactions might affect them – and thus, might lead to shifts in their political thinking – on several grounds: (1) through new experiences that lead to clarification, reconsideration, or deepening of held positions and their underlying reasoning; (2) by envisioning themselves in political situations or contexts they hadn’t previously considered; (3) by better understanding their own social (and thus, political) identities, over time; (4) by choosing or being compelled to listen to new political elites with different positions; and (5) by changing their approaches to listening to and speaking with others about political issues. These findings reveal sophistication in teenagers’ meta-political thinking that, if employed well, could help to mitigate the kinds of misunderstandings and prejudices about political others that tend to accompany a hyper-partisan political culture.

Authors

• Kevin W. Meuwissen, University of Rochester

• Rebecca Rosen, University of Rochester