| In September of 2011, a group of collective protestors, including a number of university students, took to Dewey Square opposite of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Similarly a small but vocal group of students throughout the northeast had also engaged in non-collaborative social activism both on and off of their respective campuses. A qualitative inquiry utilizing the constant comparative method of data analysis was employed to describe twelve students' experiences and their perceptions. These traditionally aged college students all shared the common experience of having participated in a form of non-collaborative social activism, protest, sit-in, occupation, or civil disobedience. Through semi-structured interviews and data analysis four major themes emerged, caring, politics, future forward, and education. The interconnections of these themes and their properties suggested a cyclical stage moral development process for student activists whereby moral action was refined by moral development, and moral development refined by moral action. |
