Young People’s Values, Attitudes, Skills, and Civic and Political Engagement

The study is based on Schwartz’s theory of basic human values (Schwartz, 2012; Schwartz et al, 2012). According to this theory, values are general beliefs that an individual holds about the desirable goals that should be striven for in life (e.g., justice, freedom, power, wealth, etc.) and that motivate a person’s behaviour and also serve as guiding principles for deciding how to behave. Because values are abstract and general, they transcend specific actions and contexts, and have a trans-situational applicability. According to Schwartz, values provide the motivational basis for attitudes and behaviour. An attitude, by contrast, is the overall mental orientation that an individual adopts towards a person, an object, a situation, etc., and is linked to a tendency to behave in a particular way towards that attitude object. Schwartz’s theory posits that values often provide the basis for attitudinal evaluations, and that attitudes can have a value-expressive function. This study will examine the relationships between values, civic and political attitudes and skills, and civic and political engagement, exploring whether values, attitudes and skills independently predict civic and political behaviours, or whether attitudes and skills mediate the effects of values on these behaviours. The study will also examine whether there is demographic variability in these relationships.