Predictors of Asian adolescents’ expected future legal protest participation: A multidimensional Rasch modeling and path analysis

Aims: This study aims to explore the external and internal factors that potentially predict and explain Asian adolescents’ intention related to future legal protest participation. These factors include political self-efficacy, political interest, and adolescents’ political experience. Data source: The data were taken from a student questionnaire conducted in five societies, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan, as part of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS). Sample: The sample of this study comprised 23,654 students (aged around 14), from 673 classes from 667 schools, with 11,850 (50.1%) male students and 11,587 (49.0%) female students, and 217 (0.9%) students who did not indicate their gender. Methods: Multidimensional random coefficients multinomial logit model (MRCMLM) was employed to generate five sets of plausible values, as five samples of the estimates, for each variable using ConQuest (Version 2.0). Using MPlus software (Muthén & Muthén, 2012), path analysis was employed to analyze each set of plausible values five times to get the averaged result. Result: The present study identified political interest and political self-efficacy as significant predictors of their intention to participate in legal protests in the future. With the exception of Taiwanese students, community participation might directly affect the participation of Asian adolescents in future legal protest. Both political discussion and school participation have only indirect and not strong effects via political interest or political self-efficacy. This means that if the activities do not arouse interest, or enhance the self-efficacy of adolescents, the impact on future legal protest participation is doubtful. Copyright © 2013 IEA.