Youth citizen participation: Textual analysis of current scholarly literature in psychology

Introduction. Youth civic and political participation has received growing interest both in political discourse and in academic research within different disciplines. Also, political, social, developmental, educational and community psychology have provided significant contribution on the topic through the comprehension of implicated psychological and psychosocial processes (Cicognani & Zani, 2015). Yet, within the literature on the issue there is lack of consensus on conceptual definitions and on the relevant contexts of participation for young people (Adler, 2005; Shaw, Brady, McGrath, Brennan, & Dolan, 2014). Concepts such as activism, political participation, civic engagement, active citizenship, community participation, and many others, are being used at times synonymously and at times distinctly to denote various ways of getting involved in societal or collective issues. Furthermore, there have been criticisms on how young people’s role as actors in the public sphere can often be challenged by normative and adult-centric assumptions in policy and scientific discourses on citizenship (Hart, 2009; Osler & Starkey, 2003; Smith, Lister, Middleton, & Cox, 2005). Thus, different understandings of youth agency evidence the contested nature of the concepts in academic literature related to young people’s active citizenship. Objective. The analysis of scientific discourse on a specific topic would permit the investigation of semantic elements and their structure as indicators of repertoires of meanings, revealing content components of social representations (Moscovici, 1961/1976, 1984). In this context, the aim of the present study is to map and explore representations of youth participation in the civic and political sphere within scholarly psychological literature from the last 25 years, in order to gain better critical understanding of how young citizens and their actions in the public sphere are viewed and theorized in psychology’s academic discourse. The dissertation project, of which this study is part of, is developed in the context of the H2020 research program CATCH-EyoU (“Constructing Active Citizenship with European Youth: Policies, Challenges and Solutions”), coordinated by the University of Bologna. Particular attention is given to how EU and the concept of active citizenship appear in the examined publications. Method. The database PsycINFO was searched for publications resulting from the use of different key terms – “activism”, “civic or political participation”, “civic or political engagement” and “active citizenship”. These were required to appear together with words denoting young people and were delimited to titles, abstracts, keywords or subjects. A software-based content analysis was performed on the abstracts of the assembled corpus, containing 1777 entries. Results. The results describe the corpus in terms of the outputs’ distribution over time, in scientific journals, across countries and between the used search terms, giving a general overview of publishing trends on the topic. The findings from the content analysis of the abstracts suggest that, within the widespread attention to participation processes in psychological literature, there are differences in the ways that youth’s role in contributing to society as citizens is understood. A cluster analysis identified four semantic universes in the corpus, which suggest the presence of a different foci, namely: civic development, conventional political and electoral activity, civic education and, finally, rights-claiming activism. The relationships between the clusters were examined through correspondence analysis. Three latent dimensions emerged, differentiating the study of youth activism from participation as learning process and from participation in conventional politics, as well as differentiating the educational focus from the one on empowering developmental processes. The conception of youth citizen participation in psychology emerges as still fragmented across research focused on different contexts of participation. The differences found relate to underlying visions of the goals of engagement, which can be represented on a continuum from “responsible” compliant active citizenship to “disruptive” activist citizenship (Staeheli, Attoh, & Mitchell, 2013). The findings highlight the need to address gaps in the development of shared definitions in the study of youth participation that would allow for a more effective role of psychological research in contributing to policy-making recommendations, including in the European context. Limits of the study and further research questions are discussed.