“Pragmatic, Complacent, Critical–Cynical, or Empathetic?” Youth Civic Engagement as Social Appraisal

Abstract

Background/Context: Many studies have systematized the wide range of youth civic engagement mechanisms identified to date; however, how young people deal with a complex flux of sociocultural and personal variables which condition their scope of engagement has received less attention. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article analyzes youths’ appraisal of social issues and how this assessment influences the ways in which they engage with those issues. It also examines the elements of their inner worlds and their cultural settings that they consider deciding whether to get involved in one way or another. Research Design: A narrative discourse analysis is completed on two hundred Mexican and Spanish adolescents’ explanations of an advertisement that sparked discussion on issues of undocumented immigration, discrimination, and past territorial disputes between the U.S.A. and Mexico. Youth civic engagement is categorized through ‘ways of engagement,’ a category that comprises the assessment of social issues performed by adolescents based on four constructs: civic knowledge, morals, discourse, and positioning. The analysis shows that four ‘ways of engagement’ are common to all the participants: pragmatic, complacent, critical-cynical, and empathetic. Findings/Results: The findings show how the participants assess the advertisement’s possible intentions, positioning, and moral implications; at the same time, they explain the potential solutions they see possible while taking their own stands toward the advertisement. This type of personal appraisal makes them decide in what way they engage with this issue. Conclusions: Finally, reflections on the possible implications of the four ‘ways of engagement’ for citizenship education are presented.