Description: A key theme in the recently identified life stage of emerging adulthood is engagement. While often not well defined, engagement can range form self-engagement (digging into figuring out what you are going to do and how you are going to do it in life and in the development of a sense of personal identity) through educational engagement (committing to being a life-long learner, to community engagement (taking an active interest in and participating in one’s local community. Being engaged makes for a richer life, but how does it link to life success, happiness and wellbeing? The study discussed in the press release linked below (the article link is down in the Read Further section) looked at the payoffs associated with three types of civic engagement, voting, volunteering, and activism and looked specifically to see how such involvements might relate to subsequent income levels, education levels, physical and mental health, and risky health behavior. How would you predict these things might be related? Once you have your hypothesis in mind have a look at the press release (and perhaps the article) and see what the research suggested.

Source: Civic Engagement in Adolescence and Young Adulthood Largely Beneficial for Adult Development, Press Release, Society for Research in Child Development.

Date: January 28, 2018

Photo Credit: Pam Douglas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i55VmjkMw-M

Links:  Article Link – https://www.srcd.org/sites/default/files/documents/child_development_-_ballard_press_release.pdf

So, any surprises in the results described in the press release, compared to your own hypotheses? One of the advantages of the huge datasets provided by studies like the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (American) or the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth (Canada) is the opportunities they provide to look at broad strokes developmental questions, over time, in large representative samples of adolescents and young adults. For such large-scale questions, these datasets are very informative. By contrast, when you get a finding like the one reported in the linked press release that suggests that activism (but not voting or volunteering) is associated with later higher levels of substance use and lower levels of mental health and you would like to dig in a bit and figure out just why that might be the case (in other words, to bore in and gatherer a tighter, closer developmental account) you cannot. As more and more of these large-scale datasets are created I suspect we will see the emergence of a pattern of research in which big questions are first addressed with big, longitudinal datasets and then a series of tighter studies are done to try and shed light on some of the developmental intricacies suggested by the more global, large-scale results. For example, I am not sure I would entertain the hypothesis that activism is bad for you. I would first want to look more closely on what sorts of issues those involved in activism took on compared to those who volunteered and those who voted. It feels to me like there is a continuum here that is not yet well-articulated, but which may have implications for how we articulate the balance between what is developmentally “good for emerging adults” and what (of emerging adult activities and “engagements”) is “good for the world.

Questions for Discussion:

1. What is community engagement?
2. What other kinds of engagement are there?
3. How might we think and talk about a balance between engagement that is good for the developing self and what is good for the community/world?

References (Read Further):

Ballard, P. J., Hoyt, L. T., & Pachucki, M. C. (2018). Impacts of Adolescent and Young Adult Civic Engagement on Health and Socioeconomic Status in Adulthood. Child Development.

Flanagan, C., & Levine, P. (2010). Civic engagement and the transition to adulthood. The future of children, 20(1), 159-179. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ883084.pdf

Watts, R. J., & Flanagan, C. (2007). Pushing the envelope on youth civic engagement: A developmental and liberation psychology perspective. Journal of community psychology, 35(6), 779-792. http://ai2-s2-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/88da/ebffae79f5fef7f25c1b41560f2870ceeefc.pdf