Civic responsibility among Australian adolescents: Testing two competing models

Abstract

The development of civic responsibility is considered to be an important component of healthy adolescent development. However, the study of its development has been relatively neglected and few studies have attempted to ground understanding of its development in a theoretical framework. The present study operationalized civic responsibility as attitudes and behaviors relating to political and community issues that are beneficial to society and compared two theoretical causal models, the social development model (SDM) and a coping-competency model for their predictive value. Gender differences were also assessed. A total of 500 subjects, drawn from a longitudinal study (the Australian Tempera..