Young people’s civic engagement in Italy: evidence on grade 8 students from the international civic and citizenship education study (ICCS) 2016

Abstract

Civic engagement represents a key aspect of a democratic society and is itself a multidimensional construct. Research has shown that the promotion of civic engagement is an important component of civic and citizenship education intended in a broad sense, pertaining to formal, non-formal and informal learning situations. Within a national scenario characterised by increasing levels of general institutional disaffection and a lack of electoral and political involvement, the recent reform in the area of civic and citizenship education (Law 92/2019) has led to lively debates on the status of its implementation in Italian schools and recent research at the national level has highlighted the lack of activities to promote students’ engagement. This study further investigates the ICCS 2016 findings on civic engagement of Italian students with two objectives: to identify possible groups of Italian eighth-grade students on the basis of their level of civic engagement and to examine the associations among these groups and some key factors reflecting school contexts and students’ attitudes and behaviours. To reach these goals, the data analyses encompassed a latent profile analysis and a logistic regression model. The latent profile analysis allowed the identification of three groups of Italian students: disengaged, moderately engaged and engaged students. The results of the regression model showed that engaged students were characterised by a higher level of citizenship self-efficacy. These findings confirm those of previous research on the key role of internal self-efficacy in promoting students’ civic engagement.