{"id":15993,"date":"2015-11-10T12:21:09","date_gmt":"2015-11-10T17:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15993"},"modified":"2015-11-10T12:21:09","modified_gmt":"2015-11-10T17:21:09","slug":"a-taxonomy-of-civic-engagement-measures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15993","title":{"rendered":"a taxonomy of civic engagement measures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Civic engagement is important to measure both\u00a0as an\u00a0intrinsic good and as a predictor of various desirable\u00a0outcomes for the individuals who engage and for their communities and governments.\u00a0Organizations&#8211;from individual schools and nonprofits to the Census Bureau and Corporation for National &amp; Community Service&#8211;often ask survey questions that\u00a0measure it. But there are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.civicyouth.org\/tools-for-practice\/survey-measures-of-civic-engagement\/\">many available survey measures<\/a>, and organizations often wonder which ones to use and how to cluster them. Here is a simple table that produces six categories, with sample survey items for each.<\/p>\n<table style=\"height: 383px;\" width=\"698\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td><strong>Citizens engage &#8230;<\/strong><\/td>\n<td><strong>with each other<\/strong><\/td>\n<td><strong>with institutions<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><strong>by communicating<\/strong><\/td>\n<td>\n<ul>\n<li>attending meetings<\/li>\n<li>discussing public affairs<\/li>\n<li>posting\/reposting social media about public issues<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n<td>\n<ul>\n<li>reading\/watching news<\/li>\n<li>contacting officials<\/li>\n<li>contacting media<\/li>\n<li>protest\/civil disobedience<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><strong>by <\/strong><strong>acting\/<\/strong><strong>working<\/strong><\/td>\n<td>\n<ul>\n<li>working to fix a community problem<\/li>\n<li>volunteering<\/li>\n<li>doing one&#8217;s job with a public purpose*<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n<td>\n<ul>\n<li>voting<\/li>\n<li>boycotting\/buycotting<\/li>\n<li>working in government (including AmeriCorps)*<\/li>\n<li>social entrepreneurship*<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><strong>by forming relationships<\/strong><\/td>\n<td>\n<ul>\n<li>membership in groups<\/li>\n<li>leadership roles in groups<\/li>\n<li>trust in other people<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n<td>\n<ul>\n<li>service on boards and advisory committees<\/li>\n<li>confidence in institutions<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>A few observations:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Deliberative democracy is the first row. <a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=9219\">Public work<\/a> is the whole table.<\/li>\n<li>With the exception of trust and confidence, these are measures of action, not of attitudes or\u00a0knowledge. I include trust and confidence basically as proxies for actual working relationships, which would be ideally measured more directly.\u00a0Attitudes and knowledge are also crucial, but they would require another table.<\/li>\n<li>Asterisks denote\u00a0constructs that are rarely measured and for which the items seem to be relatively weak.<\/li>\n<li>I prefer\u00a0survey measures of basic\u00a0constructs that are\u00a0relatively invariant across contexts. For instance,\u00a0I don&#8217;t care whether people\u00a0post on Facebook (which we may all stop doing in a few years, anyway), but I do care whether they communicate with fellow citizens about public issues. Likewise, I would count someone as doing public work whether it&#8217;s paid or not, so I am\u00a0less interested in whether people spend hours volunteering than in whether they work on public issues. The challenge is that survey measures of abstract categories are hard to understand, but\u00a0measures of highly concrete activities (like volunteering hours) tend to miss the point a bit. But we do our best with proxies.<\/li>\n<li>One way to turn these separate items into\u00a0larger wholes is psychometric&#8211;looking empirically at which clusters of items go together in a population, because clusters would\u00a0ostensibly measure underlying psychological factors. I think that is valuable work but not\u00a0the only way to proceed. These are not strictly psychological measures, manifesting the mental states of individuals. They have a lot to do with\u00a0institutions and varying social needs. Further, we are not looking for individuals\u00a0who approximate good citizenship as a\u00a0psychological state. Rather, we\u00a0are trying to improve democracy. That may require a division of labor in which, for instance, some people specialize in protest and have low confidence in institution,\u00a0while\u00a0others have high trust and volunteer a lot.\u00a0What kinds of civic engagement we\u00a0need is a social\/political question, not a psychological one.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Civic engagement is important to measure both\u00a0as an\u00a0intrinsic good and as a predictor of various desirable\u00a0outcomes for the individuals who engage and for their communities and governments.\u00a0Organizations&#8211;from individual schools and nonprofits to the Census Bureau and Corporation for National &amp; Community Service&#8211;often ask survey questions that\u00a0measure it. But there are many available survey measures, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-theory","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15993"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16007,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15993\/revisions\/16007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}