Civic Awareness and Social Participation According to Gender and Familiy Variables in Spanish Emerging Adults

Abstract

Emerging adulthood is a stage in the life cycle that elapses between late adolescence and the middle or late third decade of life (Arnett, 2000). During this stage, young people have traditionally played an important role as agents for social change, mainly during their time at university. Civic engagement is defined as "a set of individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public interest (American Psychological Association, 2012) and includes Civic awareness and Social Participation as components of that dimension. According to Plaza and Caro (2016), becoming a citizen with civic, political and social responsibility requires learning, which often comes from our closest models, from which we acquire and internalize our personal values. In this sense, family has a very important role in the social and civic education of its members (Plaza & Caro, 2016). There is a continuity between family life and social life. In our research we studied the relation between civic awareness and social participation with variables of the family context. Specifically we used several measures of parenting style (behavioural control, psychological control and parents involvement) that signigicantly affects socialization (Kocayörük, Altıntas, & İçbay, 2015). Gender has also a great influence in the way emerging adulthood express their social participation and civil awareness (Lizasso et. Al., 2018). We adopted a gender perspective to analyze the differences between men and women in all the variables mentioned above Description of methods: 1714 emerging adults university students (64,7% women, Mean age= 20.61, SD age= 2.49, Range age= 18-29) who participated in the TAE project (“Transition to Emerging Adulthood”). Descriptive analysis and correlation analysis were carried out. Results and discussion: Emerging adult women had higher levels of civic awareness and social participation than their male counterparts. In the case of young men, a loving, warmth, affective, available relationship with family is related to higher score of civic awareness while, this relationships doen’t exist for young women. However, behavioural and psychological control are negatively related with civic awareness in women but not in men. Family relationships are not related to young men social participation. Regarding women, they score lower in social participation when there is a warm, available and supportive parental relationship, however, the scores of social participation rise if there is a higher degree of psychological control. Implications/Link to the conference theme: There are gender differences in the way that men a women develop their Civic Awareness and Social Participation during the stage of emerging adulthood and these differences may be due to different family socialization strategies. We consider it important to continue investigating to what degree these strategies affect the differences we have found in both gender and civic engagement and what makes young people participate and have civic awareness.