Civic competency in teens to be studies by Rutgers-Camden scholar

May 30, 2002

CONTACT: Caroline Yount, Rutgers-Camden Public Information Office, (856) 225-6627, cnyount@camden.rutgers.edu

CAMDEN – What causes young people to become involved in their communities and how can social policy help encourage others to participate in the world around them?

These are just some of the questions that Dr. Daniel Hart, a professor of psychology and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University’s Camden campus, hopes to answer with a new two-year study that will examine the development of civic competence in young people.

Funded by a $259,446 grant from the William T. Grant Foundation and submitted under the auspices of the Rutgers-Camden Center for Children and Childhood Studies, the project is a joint venture between Hart and Jim Youniss of the Catholic University of America.

According to Hart, the goals of the study are to explain the nature of civic competence in adolescence, to assess the influence of civics education, community service, family and neighborhood on developing civic competence, and to identify the combination of factors that support the development of civic competence.

He explains youth civil competence as having four components: skills or expression of political belief; knowledge of government policy; disposition or attitudes, such as tolerance; and participation, usually defined as voting.

Researchers will use two nationally representative samples of youth and parents, the 1996 and 1999 versions of National Household Educational Survey (NHES) and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY-79) to study the factors.

The NHES, Hart says, has matched parent-adolescent pairs in which both members contribute data on civic knowledge, attitudes and behavior. It also provides data on civics classes and on extracurricular activities in which students have participated during the prior school year.

An important aspect of the NLSY data, Hart says, is that it contains information on neighborhood composition, which will give researchers to ability to estimate the role of community organizational factors on youth’s civic competence.

Results from this project should be directly relevant for developmental theory, educational programs and youth policy, Hart says. Moreover, the results should also advance the William T. Grant Foundation’s interest in promoting the concept of youth as a resource by demonstrating the ways in which contemporary youth know about and participate in our democratic society.

For the last 10 years, Hart and his research team have studied self, moral and civic competence among urban youth who showed exceptional interest in service. They also have used national survey data to examine the effects of poverty on youth development. Five years ago, Hart co-founded the Sports Teaching Adolescents Responsibility and Resiliency (STARR) program with Robert Atkins. The program for Camden kids combines year-round sports, community service, camping and homework support as a way to foster youth development in one of America’s poorest cities.

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For more information, contact Haddon Heights resident Daniel Hart at (856) 225-6515 (office); (856) 547-2545 (home); or hart@camden.rutgers.edu.