Civic engagement, including voting, has been linked to health outcomes for adults. Here, we found that census tract-level voter participation rates are significantly associated with pediatric ...inpatient bed-day rates even after adjustment for socioeconomic deprivation. Such links suggest that promotion of voting participation could be warranted in healthcare settings.
This four-page article outlines a practical framework built upon best practices that can be used by those considering the development of cross sector partnerships to address environmental and social ...issues.Written by John M. Diaz and published by the Department of Agricultural Education and Communication.https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/wc271
This meta-analytic study reviews empirical research published from 2007 to 2013 with an aim of providing robust conclusions about the relationship between social media use and citizen engagement. It ...includes 22 studies that used self-reported measures of social media use and participation, with a total of 116 relationships/effects. The results suggest that social media use generally has a positive relationship with engagement and its three sub-categories, that is, social capital, civic engagement, and political participation. More specifically, we find small-to-medium size positive relationships between expressive, informational, and relational uses of social media and the above indicators of citizen engagement. For identity- and entertainment-oriented uses of social media, our analyses find little evidence supporting their relationship with citizen engagement.
Food is a powerful entry point into the civic imagination—i.e., the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions, the social process of which ...fosters a shared vision for collective action. As an essential material component of human life, food exists as an extremely mundane and dynamic aspect of our everyday personal and social experiences; our relationship with food is intertwined with issues of privilege, access, representation, language, ethnicity, and the materiality of culture. This forum explores diverse intersections between food and civic imagination, with topics ranging from shared memories, local (re-)imaginations, history and civic action, and private-public translations. The forum discusses how food sustains, nourishes, and connects individuals and their communities by delving into both their presence—e.g., acquiring and preparing ingredients, cooking meals, sharing or selling foods—and absence—e.g., hunger and human waste in food ecology. Articles in this collection demonstrate that the civic imagination is not only fed in dining rooms and kitchens but also in less conventionally thought-of contexts, such as digital spaces, toilets, and forums such as ours. They urge us to engage with food in new imaginative ways, fostering and bridging conversations: one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like, and one must explore together to navigate and actualize the imaginative possibilities.
There is an increasing interest in improving youth digital citizenship through education. However, the term ‘digital citizenship’ currently covers a broad range of goals. To improve education, the ...current article argues for a narrower focus on (1) respectful behavior online and (2) online civic engagement. Using this definition, a digital citizenship scale was developed and assessed with a sample of 979 youth, aged 11–17 years, and confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) supported measurement of both constructs: online respect (7 items, Cronbach’s α = .92) and online civic engagement (4 items, Cronbach’s α = .70). Online respect scores decreased with youth age, and scores on both subscales were higher among girls than boys. Both online respect and civic engagement were negatively related to online harassment perpetration and positively related to helpful bystander behaviors, after controlling for other variables. Implications of the study findings for developing and evaluating digital citizenship educational programs are discussed.
Crisis situations, such as the still ongoing war in Ukraine, make civic engagement extremely important, especially in Eastern Europe. Eastern European countries not only have extensive borders with ...Ukraine, but also share a common history as members of the former communist bloc. This part of the world is characterized by low levels of civic engagement, though the proximity of war and the refugee crisis make humanitarian efforts imperative. Therefore, more research is needed to understand personal motivations for civic engagement in Eastern Europe. Employing a mixed-method approach, we tackled the following research questions: (1) What motivated Romanians’ civic engagement in the context of the war in Ukraine? and (2) Are different personal motivations related to online civic engagement differences? The sample included 118 Romanian respondents (Mage = 27.93, SDage = 9.63) who filled in an online survey shortly after the start of the war (March 2022). For the first research question, thematic analysis revealed 2 main themes: Perceived Similarity and General Concern for People. For the second research question, one way-ANOVA results showed that those motivated by perceived similarity with Ukrainians had higher levels of online civic engagement, in comparison with those motivated by general concern for people.
A long tradition of research focuses on conversation as a key catalyst for community integration and a focal mediator of media influence on participation. Changes in media systems, political ...environments, and electoral campaigning demand that these influences, and the communication mediation model, be revised to account for the growing convergence of media and conversation, heightened partisan polarization, and deepening social contentiousness in media politics. We propose a revised communication mediation model that continues to emphasize the centrality of face‐to‐face and online talk in democratic life, while considering how mediational and self‐reflective processes that encourage civic engagement and campaign participation might also erode institutional legitimacy, foster distrust and partisan divergence, disrupting democratic functioning as a consequence of a new communication ecology.
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