Civic-mindedness is more than Personality: Untangling the Overlapping Constructs of Service Motivation, Civic Efficacy and the Big Five

Abstract

Colleges and universities are designing programs explicitly designed to increase students’ civic-mindedness. Many of the constructs that measure civic-mindedness, however, have definitions that overlap with personality, mixing definitional terms that correspond with personality traits and those that correspond with non-personality constructs (e.g. skills, beliefs, etc.) Despite this overlap, research on civic-mindedness has thus far progressed in a silo away from the established literature on personality. This paper bridges this gap by examining the relationship between measures of civic-mindedness and the widely used Five-Factor Model of personality. Using survey data from undergraduate students at a large, public research university, we estimated a structural equation model to measure personality traits from the Five-Factor Model of personality and two constructs related to civic-mindedness: Service Motivation and Civic Efficacy. Results showed that variation in personality accounts for approximately 40 percent of the variation in Service Motivation and 53 percent of the variation in Civic Efficacy. We also find that there are distinct relationships between personality domains and the two civic-mindedness constructs. While these findings establish Service Motivation and Civic Efficacy as distinct constructs, personality can clearly cannot be ignored. We discuss implications for designing coursework aimed at increasing students’ civic-mindedness.

Civic-Mindedness Is More Than Personality

“…The analysis plan of this study was preregistered, see the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/5dpjf/ (Van Matre et al, 2023). The code behind this analysis, including all data inclusion criteria and pre-analysis manipulation, has been made publicly available and can be accessed via the previous link.…”