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Students’ perceptions of good citizenship: a person-centred approach

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Abstract

It is commonly understood that democracies need actively engaged democrats and that adolescence is a significant period in life for educating engaged citizens. Whereas previous quantitative studies in the field have primarily focused on the relationships among participation-related variables, the research reported here aims to categorize secondary school students according to their civic orientations. Thus, the present study proposes a different strategy of analysing quantitative data, namely a person-centred statistical approach, which is well suited when the research focuses on heterogeneous populations. It utilizes attitudes towards the importance of citizenship behaviours and employed latent class analysis using two cohorts of the Australian National Assessment Program: Civics and Citizenship. Analyses yielded four groups for both the importance of conventional citizenship and the importance of social movement-related citizenship. About one-third of all students were ‘political enthusiasts’, as they were likely to endorse all kinds of citizenship behaviour. These patterns were stable across cohorts, but some latent class sizes varied between both cohorts. The findings of this innovative approach to the study of good citizenship are linked to previous research, and possible explanations for the differences between both cohorts—cohort, lifecycle, and period effects—and the potential of person-centred quantitative research for civics and citizenship education and policy are discussed.

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Notes

  1. The study by Chow and Kennedy (2014) also included students’ views of good citizenship behaviors (indices), but they did not report details of respective results.

  2. The variances of the importance of the conventional citizenship index and of the importance of the social movement-related citizenship index are considerably smaller within the respective classes compared to the overall samples, which also indicates reliable clustering.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. It was carried out during a visiting fellowship (2014/2015) and while the author was a postdoctoral research associate (2016), respectively, at The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. Part of this research was conducted while the author was affiliated with the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories, Bamberg, Germany. The author expresses his gratitude to Prof Murray Print, Prof M. Kent Jennings and Prof Kerry J. Kennedy, as well as to Marlene Mauk, Sugianto Tandra and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The author also wishes to thank Prof Judith Torney-Purta for a one-to-one discussion of person-centred quantitative analysis; Dr Carolyn Barber for valuable feedback and references; and the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority for the provision of the NAP-CC data.

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  1. Faculty of Education, The University of Sydney, 401c, 4/F, Runme Shaw Building, Pok Fu Lam Road, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Frank Reichert

  2. Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Sydney, Education Building A35, Sydney Camperdown, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Frank Reichert

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 Fit indices for separate LCA models
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Table 6 Fit indices for LCA models using the combined sample of both cohorts
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Reichert, F. Students’ perceptions of good citizenship: a person-centred approach. Soc Psychol Educ 19, 661–693 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-016-9342-1

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