Youth Participation in Political Activities

Bernard Schissel and Li Zong wanted to understand how young people see themselves as citizens in their communities and citizens of the world.

Bernard Schissel and his collaborator Li Zong, have spent their professional lives studying the rights of children and immigration. Now, working together, with the help of funds provided by an Insight Grant, they wanted to understand how youth cope with the barriers they experience when they try to participate in political life.

Together, Schissel and Zong aimed to find out what helped or prevented young people from fully participating in political activities.

They wanted to understand how young people see themselves as citizens in their communities and citizens of the world. In order to achieve this, they chose to take a wide view of politics, and chose to examine youth engagement from the community to the global level. They also want to know how post-secondary education affects the attitudes of youth toward politics and political engagement, and how they feel about the future. They chose to study groups of students in Canada and in China, in English as well as Mandarin, in order get a feel for how citizenship, political engagement, and post-secondary education differ across cultures. They also took a look at two competing perspectives, one that views formal education as a place for young people to learn about political life, and the other that believes schools should be considered neutral environments.

Working together, Schissel and Zong created an assessment system in order to assessing attitudes and behaviour applicable to both Chinese and Canadian students. The results of this work are now being used as a starting point for a second, larger, and longer-term research program, with hopes of getting a clearer picture of youth engagement, citizenship, and political life in the future.