Examining the role of information in the civic engagement of youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Despite the decline in youth participation in traditional politics over time, engagement in alternative forms of civic engagement is increasing. Existing research focuses on disenfranchised youth; in this paper, we describe an initial exploration of the role of information in initial and ongoing civic engagement. In this pilot study, we conducted a focus group with six teenagers (15–17 years old) recognized by their teachers and peers for being highly engaged in their schools and/or communities, in order to understand the self‐described motivations, influences, and information behaviors of an important demographic which has not been widely studied in existing literature: youth who are highly engaged, but not yet eligible to vote in democratic elections. The participants were from six different provinces in Canada, and included a mix of rural, suburban, and urban youth. Participant responses suggested that their information environment, including the availability of information about civic affairs and opportunities to become directly involved, played a role in their socialization as engaged citizens. Moreover, they indicated that the effect of their information environment on their own civic engagement was cumulative over time: the more an issue appeared, the more likely they were to engage with it. Based on this focus group discussion, we suggest a set of interpretations that describe the role of information environments, the cumulative impact of civic information, and the levels of information consumption used by youth. While these theories will require additional data to confirm or reject, we expect that our observations will help inform efforts to engage youth in civic society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".