Lonnie R. Sherrod

Dimensions of citizenship and opportunities for youth development: The what, why, when, where, and who of citizenship development.

In this concluding article we consider the definition and conceptualization of citizenship, why youth should be interested in citizenship, when developmentally should we as a society try to foster it, where in youths lives should our efforts be placed, and the existence of potentially different needs and usefulness of different strategies in diverse populations of youth. In addressing the what, why, when, where, and who of citizenship development, we review the contributions to this issue as well as other literature. We conclude the chapter with a charge for future research.

Citizenship attitudes and allegiances in diverse youth.

This study examined the relationships among three sets of variables in a sample of 299 diverse high school youth: (a) demographic variables such as ethnicity and immigrant status, (b) attitudes toward citizenship responsibilities, and (c) allegiances to three socializing institutions--family, school, and community. A measure of citizenship attitudes was found to identify two distinct constructs--Polity-Oriented and Civic-Oriented attitudes toward citizenship responsibilities, relating to the polity or nation-state, and to serving the community. European Americans were consistently lower on Polity-Oriented attitudes than Hispanic teens, and lower on family allegiance than other non-European American groups. Hispanic youth reported significantly lower community involvement than other non-European American groups as well as European American youth. Whereas the only significant correlation between allegiance and citizenship attitudes was between family allegiance and Polity-Oriented attitudes, there were multiple moderating effects of immigrant status and ethnicity. Results are discussed in terms of ethnicity and allegiances as contexts of socialization for the development of attitudes toward citizenship responsibilities.

Ensuring Liberty by Promoting Youth Development

‘Our children are our future’ is a phrase often used to promote or justify investment in children. In Liberty: Thriving and civic engagement among America’s youth Richard Lerner, focusing on youth, examines what this phrase means in terms of the societal commitment needed to realize positive outcomes to human development. Furthermore, this phrase is most often couched in economic terms. Labor needs qualified workers. If people do not appropriately produce and contribute to the economy, our ranking as a world economic leader will suffer. Lerner on the other hand examines the implications for civil society. We cannot maintain a democratic society without the adequate and appropriate participation of citizens. If societies do not support youth’s development into citizenship, they as adults will not flourish as citizens and our liberty will be threatened. This small paperback book (203 pages) is a tour de force in its summary of developmental theory and research. In the opening chapters Lerner reviews developmental systems theory, evolutionary theory and genetics, the goodness of fit model, and developmental contextualism. His overall approach is also grounded in a life-span or life-course perspective that also carries ideas of lifelong plasticity and developmental embeddedness. Lerner’s most overarching theoretical orientation, however, is the focus on positive youth development (PYD). I fully share Lerner’s theoretical orientation; it is a large part of the appeal of this book. My only disagreement with his approach is his harsh criticism of behavior genetics. Although much of his analysis of this approach is correct, I do believe that behavior genetics has a contribution to make to developmental research. Lerner criticizes behavior geneticists’ reliance on heritability, sees it as not sufficiently attentive to contexts, and argues that other fields such as molecular genetics and neuroscience present findings that conflict with behavior genetics ideas. I disagree with his analysis less

Recognizing Civic Engagement as a Critical Domain of Human Development

Citizenship is a critically important area of adult functioning so that its development should be of much greater significance in developmental science. Furthermore, it provides a means of exploring a number of key issues in developmental science. It is a prime example of social cognition, and lends itself to examination of interesting issues about development itself and developmental processes. Because it results from lifelong socialization and is influenced by most childhood socialization factors such as families and schools, it offers a useful means of studying socialization. It varies across most indicators of youth diversity so can be a safe way of indexing the increasing heterogeneity of our youth. And it is both a contributor to and an expression of positive youth development, a powerful new approach to research and policy. In this regard, it provides a useful tool for investigating the development of human capital. It should be one of the most important topics in developmental science, not a side issue that only a few people study, that is not covered in child development texts, as is now the case. But attention is needed to the development of theory and measurement.