Political Participation Profiles in a College Student Population

Dena A. Pastor, Chris R. Patterson, & Abraham Goldberg   |    Volume 18 Issue 2  |   

A central purpose of higher education is to prepare students to be active participants in our democracy. To measure how students intend to participate, we need items to capture their anticipated behavior and analytical tools to summarize the results in meaningful ways. This study used a popular set of items along with latent class analysis (LCA) to identify four political participation profiles which differed both in the extent and nature of their anticipated participation. Differences among profiles in gender, ideology, and political knowledge were examined to acquire validity evidence, which was generally supportive. In addition to describing the profiles and how they can be used to assess interventions and understand college students, we offer improvements and suggestions for the measurement of civic and political participation in young adults.

Click here to download the full article

« Back to Archive