Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 33 (2012) 121–123

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Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

Book review

The Age of Aquarius has dawned: Maturation of the study of activeand engaged citizenship among youth☆

Lonnie R. Sherrod, Judith Torney-Purta, Constance A. Flanagan (Eds.),Handbook of research on civic engagement in youth. JohnWiley & Sons,Hoboken, NJ, 2010, ISBN: 97820247025227425 (cloth), 706 pp., $125

Harmony and understanding

Sympathy and trust abounding

–Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In

In the 1960s, youth civic engagement was apparent to anyonewho watched the evening news or who, in the summer of 1968, hap-pened to wander into Chicago's Grant Park during the 1968 Demo-cratic National Convention. Yet, with some significant exceptions(see Flanagan and Sherrod, 1998; and Torney-Purta, 2009, for discus-sions), there was relatively little good developmental science con-ducted during this period about the active and engaged citizenshipof adolescents. In fact, there was even some denial that this 1960s in-stantiation of civic engagement was part of adolescent developmentat all. For instance, at least one prominent developmental scientist(Adelson, 1970) argued that there were no essential differences be-tween the civic behaviors of this 1960s adolescent generation andthe corresponding behaviors of their parents. The purported genera-tion gap between youth of this period and their parents was, toAdelson, more apparent than real.

Now, almost a half-century later, active and engaged citizenship isubiquitous and, some scholars would suggest (e.g., Zaff, Hart,Flanagan, Youniss, and Levine, 2010), a central focus of the develop-mental science of adolescence. This focus on youth civic engagementis due primarily to the scientific and professional leadership of LonnieSherrod and the colleagues who joined him in editing the Handbookof Research on Civic Engagement in Youth, Judith Torney-Purta andConstance Flanagan, and their collaborators in a consortium pre-sciently funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. Colleagues suchas LaRue Allen, William Damon, Alan Gitelson, Daniel Hart, Ron Kassi-mir, Jack McLeod, Steven Russell, Alex Stipik, and James Youniss were,among others, members of this consortium (although we did not as-sess birthdates, we believe many of these scholars were adolescentsin the 1960s, a point to which we will return).

The key goal of the consortium was to promote research on youthcivic development. This handbook is compelling evidence of thegroup's success in meeting this goal. The scholarship in this handbookattests clearly to the fact that this field of developmental science has“come of age.” We find in the handbook theory-predicated research

☆ The preparation of this article was supported in part by grants from the National4-H Council and the Thrive Foundation for Youth.

0193-3973/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2011.11.003

that addresses fundamental issues of human development, for in-stance, the structure of developmental phenomena, and their trans-formational and variational change; continuity and discontinuity inthe course of development; and the relation (indeed integration) ofindividual-level and ecological influences on intraindividual changeand on interindividual differences in such change. The scholarshipin this handbook points to the necessity of understanding that the in-tegration of the actions of young people and of their ecology shapesthe substance and course of the development of civic engagement.Therefore, this scholarship is feeding back non-recursively to itsconceptual underpinnings to refine and to advance models of the re-lational developmental system (Overton, 2010) within which theyoung person is embedded, that is, ideas that emphasize that the fun-damental process of development is the mutually influential relationsbetween the developing individual and the changes in his or hermulti-level context.

Indeed, the scholarship represented in this handbook is an exem-plar of contemporary developmental science, demonstrating the im-portance of multidisciplinary and international perspectives aboutthe nature of the relational developmental system, the central sub-stantive significance of diversity in the ontogenetic course of civic en-gagement, and the intimate link between theory and method inconceptualizing and designing change-sensitive developmental re-search to measure the active and engaged citizenship of youth. Thechapters in the handbook demonstrate that this scholarship con-tinues to inform the empirical study of active and engaged citizenshipamong young people and, as well, to influence discussions of and ap-plications to youth policies and programs. Moreover, the handbook'schapters underscore that, as it has “come of age,” the study of youthcivic engagement has been increasingly interdisciplinary. This “emer-gent” feature of this domain of scholarship points to the importanceof integrating levels of analysis within the developmental system inorder to understand the ontogeny of active and engaged citizenship.

Torney-Purta (e.g., Hess and Torney, 1967; Torney, Oppenheim,and Farnen, 1975; and Torney-Purta, 1982, 1990) has been arguablythe most prominent developmental scientist in this domain, consis-tently producing high quality scholarship about youth civic engage-ment from the 1960s through this writing. The editors of thehandbook note that, despite this scholarly record, interest in thefield of youth civic engagement waxed and waned from the 1960sto the beginning of the 1990s. They suggest that historical events(e.g., the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Children, and the fall ofthe Berlin wall) coalesced in the 1990s with scholarship about civicparticipation (e.g., Putnam, 1995, 2000) to foster a sea change in thecentrality of the study of civic engagement within the developmentalscience of adolescence. However, there were other significant histor-ical events (e.g., the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Vietnamprotests of the 1960s and 1970s, and the assassinations of PresidentJohn F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the Reverend Dr. MartinLuther King, Jr., and Malcolm X) that occurred along with importantscholarship relevant to youth civic behaviors (e.g., Hess and Torney,1967; Horn and Knott, 1971; Moller, 1968; Torney et al., 1975).

122 Book review

Notwithstanding the influence of these historical events on researchin the social and behavioral sciences, it took the scholarship of the ed-itors of this volume and of the members of the consortium, and thework of the authors represented in this handbook, to create andbring to maturity a vibrant field of scholarship—as evidenced by theneed for and the value of its first handbook.

The creation and nurturing of this field of developmental scienceamong these scholars at this point in history raises an important setof questions. What accounts for the passion and commitment ofthese scholars to create and then to successfully bring to maturitythe field of youth civic engagement, when prior cohorts of develop-mental scientists did not make this contribution? Why these scholars,why this scholarly focus, and why at this point in time? We believethat the efforts of the members of the consortium, and the “scholarlymovement” they created to “bring to age” the study of youth civic en-gagement, is not serendipitous. Our answer to these questions aboutthe emergence and current vigor of this field of scholarship is thatthese characteristics of contemporary research about youth civic en-gagement reflect the convergence of the life spans of a cohort of aca-demics – scientifically successful and professionally prominent andinfluential social and behavioral scientists – whose own orientationto active and engaged citizenship, and whose passion and enthusiasmfor understanding the bases of, and learning ways to promote, the ac-tive and engaged citizenship of diverse young people, were honed bythe events they experienced as “youth of the '60s.” In essence, the cre-ation and promotion of the developmental science of youth civic en-gagement is a cohort effect—one that would have not been likely tooccur had not the leaders of this area shared “time and place” fortheir own youth development (Elder, Modell, and Parke, 1993). Notonly their interest in the topic of youth civic engagement, but theirconcerted efforts to build this field of scholarship, that is, to make itas central a part of developmental science as the study of other indi-vidual and social processes of development, and to contribute to thepositive development of youth and to civil society by applying evi-dence from youth civic engagement work to youth policies andcommunity-based programs, derive from the passion and commit-ment to active and engaged citizenship they developed during theiryounger years. In short, the very process of youth civic engagementthat these scholars are studying may be applied to their own lives.

Our conjecture reflects the sort of life course analysis epitomized byGlen Elder's seminal scholarship, for example, in Children of the GreatDepression (1974, 1999) and in many other works (e.g., see Elder,1998; Elder and Shanahan, 2006), including a chapter on the role of his-tory in shaping the structure and direction of adolescent development(Elder, 1980) that appeared in the first edition of the Handbook of Ad-olescent Psychology which, ironically, was edited by Adelson (1980).Indeed, the editors of the present volume note that both life-courseand life-span models of youth development (which focus on cohortand ontogenetic changes respectively) provide an important frame forunderstanding the development of youth civic engagement, and thusof the implications of such development for subsequent life periods (in-cluding the subsequent life periods of a criticalmass of 50+year-old ac-ademics who experienced their youth in 1960s America).

Life-course and life-span models speak to the mutually influentialrelations between young people and their worlds, relations that, asnoted, constitute the fundamental process of human developmentwithin relational, developmental systems theories (Overton, 2010).Life-span and life-course models share with another instance of rela-tional developmental systems theory – the positive youth development(PYD) perspective (e.g., Lerner, 2006; Lerner et al., 2011) – a concernwith the role of history (temporality) in providing a basis for systematicintraindividual change (for “plasticity”) in adolescent development.However, as the present editors explain, instantiations of the PYDmodel may be particularly useful in this field of research becausethese conceptions often focus explicitly on civic engagement as both asource and as an outcome of PYD (e.g., Lerner, 2004).

In essence, then, the theoretical frame Sherrod et al. bring to thestudy of youth civic engagement places young people into the flowof history, a history that can involve events that promote their activecitizenship during adolescence, account for their positive youth de-velopment, and potentially influence young people in decisionsabout what to do with their later lives—with the personal, civic, andpolitical, and even vocational/career facets of their adult years.What the scholarship presented in this handbook underscores, then,is that the fusion across life of active and engaged citizenship and pos-itive development may be marked by the production of valued contri-butions to the diverse sectors of civil society.

Sherrod, Torney-Purta, and Flanagan express the “hope that thisfirst Handbook in the field furthers research on civic engagement inyouth and, in so doing, also contributes to the world-wide promotionof the development of democratic citizenship” (p. 15). As amply dem-onstrated by the scholarship included in their handbook, and as ex-emplified by their scientific and professional leadership, the activeand engaged citizenship of youth (and of former-youth) is a forcefor appreciating the role of diverse young people in furthering civilsociety, social justice, and liberty. The field of youth civic engagementresearch has indeed “come of age,” as reflected in the production ofthis timely, important, and impressive handbook!

References

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Lerner, R. M., Lerner, J. V., Lewin-Bizan, S., Bowers, E. P., Boyd, M. J., Mueller, M., Schmid,K., & Napolitano, C. (2011). Positive youth development: Processes, programs, andproblematics. Journal of Youth Development, 6, 40–64.

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Overton, W. F. (2010). Life-span development: Concepts and issues. In W. F. Overton(Ed.), Handbook of life-span development, vol. 1. (pp. 1–29). Hoboken, NJ: JohnWiley & Sons.

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Torney, J. V., Oppenheim, A. N., & Farnen, R. F. (1975). Civic education in ten countries:An empirical study. New York: Halsted Press.

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Zaff, J. F., Hart, D., Flanagan, C. A., Youniss, J., & Levine, P. (2010). Developing civic en-gagement within a civic context. In M. E. Lamb, A. M. Freund, & R. M. Lerner(Eds.), The handbook of life-span development, vol. 2. (pp. 590–630). Hoboken, NJ:John Wiley & Sons.

123Book review

Richard M. Lerner⁎Michelle J. Boyd

Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development,301 Lincoln Filene Building,

and Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development,Tufts University, Medford, MA, 02155, USA

⁎Corresponding reviewer.E-mail addresses: Richard.Lerner@tufts.edu (R.M. Lerner),

Michelle.Boyd@tufts.edu (M.J. Boyd).

16 November 2011