Citizenship and future civic and political participation: A tale of two Chinese societies

Citizenship is a legal status over which citizens have little control. Where citizens have control over their future civic and political participation, their current intention of civic and political participation may be affected by their current civic efficacy and activities. These civic efficacy and activity profiles also count towards individual and school factors, while reflecting features of the civic society the citizens live in. To identify individual and school factors that affect students’ intention of future civic and political participation and the nature of the participation, this study will be exploratory in nature. We will use the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS) 2009 Hong Kong and Taiwan data (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Kerr, & Losito, 2010). Questionnaire survey was administered with a stratified random sample of Grade 8 students in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Scales that sketch students’ civic efficacy and activity profiles and that measur their intention of future civic and political participation will first be validated using the Rasch scaling method. To be specific, the Rasch rating scale model (RSM) will be employed to measure the psychometric properties of these scales with four-point Likert type items. Psychometric information such as construct maps and item measures will be used for the test of dimensionality of the scales. Next the calibrated Rasch measures will be used for a series of latent regressions analyses, which takes into account the measurement errors and estimates more accurately group differences on the latent traits. The identification of individual and school factors that had a significant impact on students’ future political participation, as well as on portraying their efficacy and activity profiles, will provide meaningful implications for citizenship education. Considering the interplay of social context and citizenship education, Hong Kong and Taiwan may represent varied Asian conceptions of citizenship and hence civic efficacy and activities. Among the five Asian societies joining the 2009 ICCS survey, Hong Kong and Taiwan are the only two from the Greater China Region and are both originated from the Confucian tradition. In this sense, similarities across the two societies might be revealed along with distinctiveness.