How to Measure Active Citizenship

Active citizenship is a concept many sociologists and political scientists try to measure in their studies. The difficulty is that it is a vague concept that could mean many things to different people. In various countries, some aspects of citizenship that matter more than others. For example, participation in elections could be important in North American, but participation in protests could be important in a dictatorship. Therefore, there are different possible ways to measure active citizenship. Good measurements focus on what active citizenship means for your study.

Instructions

1. Identify your case study: At the start, define what you want to study. Your focus could be a place (e.g. a country or a state) or a group of people in different places (e.g. youth, visible minorities). Narrow your interest in order to find useful information.

2. Review common definitions: Citizenship means community involvement or volunteerism to scholars studying social capital. Other scholars look at citizen's participation in social change or movements, or spreading values. Some research information related to participation in democratic processes, such as voting.

3. Identify the most important aspects of citizenship for your study: The literature shares common themes -- citizens of a country (or state) becoming informed and acting, or reacting to the government or its policies. This is too broad to provide useful information, so you need specific items relevant to your study interests.

4. Find specific measurement, or measurements, for your definition: Try looking for specific statistics relevant to your definition. For example, if your interest is the active citizenship of seniors and you define citizenship by participation in democratic processes, then a useful measurement would be voter turnout.

5. Consider what information is available: There is a lot of data out there and information is increasingly becoming available online. If no data is available for your measure, you either need to find a "next best" measurement, or find resources to do the research yourself.

6. Consider composite measurements: If there are multiple possible measurements, you could use an index. This requires thinking carefully and justifying how these measurements relate to each other. Perhaps one measure is more important than another and should be weighted more in the index.

7. Test a couple practice calculations: Use a small set of data to test run your index or indicator. Test is the results make intuitive sense and if they are consistent with other studies. If resources allow, try the measurement a couple times to see if it is reliable and consistent.

References

• European Commissions Joint Research Center; "The characterization of Active Citizenship in Europe"; 2009