CIRCLE || The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement

Applying For CIRCLE Grants Past Grants
Funded Work In Progress
	Political Participation & Voting Community Participation Civic Knowledge Youth Attitudes & Beliefs News & Entertainment Media K-12 Civic Education Service Learning Higher Education Non-College 18-25愀 Group Membership & Social Networks Concepts of Citizenship Race, Gender, Immigrant Status

Race, Gender, Immigrant Status

1. "Why We Are Engaged in Civil Society: In the Words of Immigrant Youth"
Principal Investigators: Lene Arnett Jensen and James Youniss, Catholic University of America

2. "Civic Engagement of Immigrant and Native Minority Youth"
Principal Investigators: Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick, Florida International University

See our past grants page for research findings from completed grants.

"Why We Are Engaged in Civil Society: In the Words of Immigrant Youth"
Principal Investigators: Lene Arnett Jensen and James Youniss, Catholic University of America

Immigrant youth constitute a sizeable and rising proportion of the American population. The extent to which they become civically engaged will be crucial to determining their positive engagement with society. However, there is only very limited social science research on the civic engagement of immigrant youth. This project aims to provide an in-depth analysis of a set of qualitative interview data collected with 80 immigrant adolescents and parents residing in the Washington, D.C. area. Specifically, the aims are to: 1) Provide a systematic and thorough description of the nature of the immigrant adolescents' civic engagement (both community and political engagement), and of the reasons that they state for their engagement (or lack thereof) in civil society; 2) Examine the connections that the immigrant adolescents' see between their civic engagement and other aspects of their lives, including their sense of connection to religious institutions and their cultural group; and 3) Examine the extent to which the reasons immigrant adolescents state for their engagement (or lack thereof) in civil society are similar to those stated by their parents. The project focuses on immigrants from El Salvador and India. Qualitative findings from the interviews will be supplemented with findings from questionnaire responses from participants in order to generate more complete conclusions with respect to the nature of immigrant youth's civic engagement.

"Civic Engagement of Immigrant and Native Minority Youth"
Principal Investigators: Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick, Florida International University

The goal of the proposed project is to understand the meaning of "civic engagement" for immigrant and native minority youth and how their civic engagement is formed, translated and applied in different lived contexts within their local communities. Our fundamental question is: What roles and obligations do adolescent immigrants, children of immigrants and native minorities feel and enact toward their communities and the larger polity? Our specific questions are:
--What is the range of actual activities that can be labeled "civic engagement" for this population?
--How do these activities vary among particular immigrant and native minority groups?

The U.S. now has the largest number ever of foreign-born people, 28.4 million. Roughly one in every five children lives in an immigrant-headed household. By the end of the 1990s, approximately 3 million foreign-born children and 11 million US-born children of foreign-born parents lived in the United States. Significantly, immigrant populations are rapidly increasing most quickly outside of traditional areas of settlement. While most immigrants are adults, their foreign and U.S.-born children are the fastest growing component of the U.S. population. How these children integrate into U.S. society and the ways that they civically engage will greatly determine the nature of civil society in the U.S. over the next few decades. Yet, few researchers have focused on immigrant youth and even fewer have examined issues of civic engagement for immigrant youth.

We have been studying a cohort of 300 immigrant and native minority adolescents for the past seven years from the point when they entered four Miami high schools until three years after their scheduled graduation. Specifically, our research focuses on African Americans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Mexicans. These groups are the most important immigrant and native minority groups in Miami and Mexicans are also the largest immigrant group in the U.S. We have participant observation, survey, focus group and interview data and through the CIRCLE grant we are coding this data for computerized qualitative analysis.