Development of Adolescent Moral and Civic Identity Through Community Service: A Qualitative Study in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article draws on Marcia's model that defines four statuses of adolescents' identity formation to examine adolescent moral and civic identity formation. Interviews were conducted with 23 students at three Hong Kong senior secondary schools to address the following research question: How does community service help adolescents develop their moral and civic identities? Among the participants, most of them reported attaining moral identity development and just a few participants reported civic identity development; nonetheless, one of them did not report identity development in the moral and civic domains. Furthermore, five core elements of community service programs facilitating the participants' identity formation emerged from the findings, namely, meaningful service activities, diversity, youth voice, reflection, and extended service duration. The influence of these service elements varied across the moral and civic domains of identity. By reporting the findings gained from an East Asian school setting, the article contributes to a fuller understanding of the role of community service in adolescent identity formation.

Exploring the Contextual Influences on Adolescent Career Identity Formation: A Qualitative Study of Hong Kong Secondary Students

“…Researchers have also applied the ISI to compare the ego identity of Asian, Asian/Caucasian, and Caucasian college students (Grove, 1991), to identify the ethnic domain of identity of Asian American high school students (Phinney, 1989), and to explore how Chinese advisor teachers impacted the ego identity of high school students who constantly violated rules (Lee, 2010). The FISI has been mainly employed in ego identity studies in the European context (Hauber, 2007), while a recent study reported how the FISI was adapted to a sample of Hong Kong high school students to unpack their moral and civic identity statuses (Xu & Yang, 2017). The present study adapted the two protocols by adding subquestions under each main question to make explicit the participants’ inner state of career identity.…”

Self-Assessment Of Personal Civic Identity In Adolescents

“…Civic identity in various groups has been studied by Shikova (2009), Grishina (2002, Akhmetishina (2015), Loginova (2010), Pozdeeva, Trostinskaya, Evseeva, and Ivanova (2017), Demidova and Mokhorova, (2018), Karwowski, Zaffar, Phillips, Sullivan, and Laws (2018), Demidov and Mokhorov, (2018), Xu and Yang, (2018) and others. Avksentyeva and Aksumova (2013) focus on the multifaceted character of personal civic identity.…”