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Session Submission Summary

Citizenship and democratic education using large-scale assessments: Person-centered approaches.

Thu, April 18, 11:45am to 1:15pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific F

Group Submission Type: Paper Session

Proposal

In the last decades, a series of threats to democracy and its legitimacy has been observed. The concern for the future of democracy and diagnosis about the disaffected youth of political life and the imminent generational change has led both social scientists, national and international agencies to prioritize the comprehension of the process of acquiring dispositions, behaviors, and relevant abilities for the execution of civic duties during the school phase. The main focus has been on the process of socialization within families and within schools. This focus concurs with various authors who highlighted the relevance of the acquisition of socio-political dispositions in early experiences. In this line, available research aimed at investigating political socialization processes has developed through a series of large-scale international studies that consider aspects such as socio-economic characterization, civic knowledge, political attitudes and citizen behavior at the school level. Among these is the Civic Education Study from 1999 (Civic Education Study-CIVED) and the International Study of Civic and Citizenship Education from 2009 and 2016 waves (International Civic and Citizenship Study- ICCS). These studies target 8th graders (mean age 14 years old) from several countries, including participating countries from Europe, Asia, and Latinoamerica. The data provided by these represent a unique opportunity for the study of sources of political socialization in diverse contexts.
This panel proposes four presentations that address the attitudinal and behavioral patterns of students, focusing on four relevant topics for civic and citizenship education for democracy. Two presentations are focused on developed countries, deepen on attitudes related to tolerance and populism. Authors consider tolerance, as an understanding and endorsement of equality between different groups (Cote and Erikson 2009; van Zalk et al., 2013), which is considered an essential democratic attitude and an essential prerequisite for a peaceful coexistence in the increasingly diverse contemporary societies (Almond and Verba 1963; Freitag and Rapp, 2015; Sherrod and Lauckhardt 2009). Tolerance of diversity is expected to promote democratic interaction and equitable participation while intolerant attitudes may lead to racism and violence and pose threats to the stability of democratic institutions (Berry and Sam 2014). In the European context, monitoring and promoting tolerance is an essential part of the policies focused on education for democratic citizenship (European Council 2015). In this sense they wonder 1) is it possible to identify precursors of anti-immigrant attitudes (and other attitudes associated with populism) among the generation of fourteen-year-olds in 1999 (who currently are adults in their mid-thirties)? Moreover, 2) if is it possible to identify the potential patterns of (in)tolerance among European youth among students of fourteen-years-old in 2016?.
The other two presentations are focused on Latin American countries. Authors claim that Latin American presents a higher level of political disaffection, observed in a scenario characterized for by high rates of disapproval of political activities, political disaffection from the political process, and distrust of politicians, parties and parliaments. Given that the political participation and institutional trust are two key aspects to understand the future political behavior in these set of countries.
In Latin American, several studies have shown that the level of political trust in adult citizen is the lowest than other regions of the world. This pattern tends to be similar in young people, but there is important heterogeneity among institutions. For instance, the trust in political parties, courts of justice and the police are relatively lower than in other countries, but the trust in other institutions, such as the school are higher. Regarding political participation, evidence indicates lower rates of participation in traditional channels but in parallel a diversification and amplification of the repertoires of participation, such as attending marches or demonstrations, or other forms of protest, which is particularly relevant in younger cohorts of youth. In this context, authors inquiry 3) how many and what are the profiles of future youth political participation in Latin America? How do these profiles vary between countries? Additionally, they question 4) if is it possible to distinguish different profiles of trust in institutions? Which characteristics are associated with these different profiles of institutional trust?
The four presentations integrate insights from different theoretical perspectives and used person-centered approach using data from the countries participating in the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study - ICCS 2016 - and IEA Civic Education Study - CIVED 1999. Person-centered approaches are proposed as an alternative to variable-centered approaches in order to evaluate non-observed heterogeneity between individuals in the different issues proposed. Furthermore, this kind of models and their results can capture interest among the general public and policymakers because researchers delineate profiles of students holding specific attitudes and estimates their prevalence in the population. This type of results stands in contrast to the traditional product generated by variable-centered approaches, which relies on the presentation of coefficients to which are challenging to communicate in abstraction. Person-centered approaches have the virtue of modeling nominal quantities and can be communicated as conditional proportions. All authors used different software packages, including R libraries and Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2015) to fit latent class analysis and latent profile analysis.

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