Categorizing College Students Based on Their Perceptions of Civic Engagement Activities: A Latent Class Analysis Using the Social Agency Scale

Dena A. Pastor, Thai Q. Ong, and Christopher D. Orem   |    Volume Thirteen  |   

A common approach to assessing one facet of civic engagement (CE) is through administering the Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s (CIRP) social agency scale, which captures the extent to which respondents feel personally responsible to be involved in addressing various social and political issues. To summarize the scale’s results in a manner that conveys the type of CE activities college students consider important, the current study used latent class analysis (LCA) with responses from 2,591 students. A 4-class solution was favored with one class considering all activities important, another class considering few activities important, and two other classes differing in the extent to which they preferred political to nonpolitical activities. Validity analyses partially supported the 4-class solution. Implications of the results for the development of CE programming are discussed, with particular attention paid to the relative emphasis of nonpolitical and political CE on college campuses.

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