Modeling the relationship between a social responsibility attitude and youth activism

Despite existing literature that demonstrates the relationship between an attitude of social responsibility and activism; few studies have examined the underlying factor structure of social responsibility. The current study had two goals. The first goal was to determine the structure of a social responsibility attitude for urban adolescents. The second goal was to determine the relationship between social responsibility and civic activism and political activism. The participants were a sample of 221 adolescents from schools and youth serving organizations in metropolitan Atlanta, GA. Confirmatory factor analysis was utilized to examine the structure of social responsibility. The results indicated that a model with a single latent factor explained the data better than a model with one latent factor representing neighborhood social responsibility and one latent factor representing global social responsibility. There were significant positive relationships between social responsibility and civic activism and political activism when controlling for parental activism and peer activism. This study suggests that a social responsibility attitude may exist as a single factor amongst urban adolescents and it has added empirical support to show that higher levels of social responsibility are associated with greater depth of involvement in civic and political activism. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.;INDEX WORDS: Social responsibility, Youth activism, Civic engagement, Political activism, Adolescence, Sociopolitical development.