Exploring the Role of Digital and Socio-civic Skills for Promoting Youth Participation and Digital Citizenship

Mark Peart,Sixto Cubo-Delgado,Prudencia Gutiérrez-Esteban

doi:10.12973/eu-jer.11.2.697

Abstract

<p style="text-align: justify;">The emergence of digital technologies and a more global and digital society has brought about the need to develop and educate in Digital Citizenship, as well as to study how youth are taught to participate and learn citizenship in a digital age. This paper aims to explore the role of digital and socio-civic skills development, as facilitators for youth participation and analyses the relationship between sociodemographic variables (sex, age, educational level, and political ideology) with the participatory profile of participants. This is a study with a quantitative methodology, where, based on non-probabilistic convenience sampling, 534 young people between 16 and 35 years old from Spain, completed an online questionnaire regarding the development of digital and socio-civic skills. The results indicate how a participant’s participatory profile is related to other variables. In addition, significant differences are observed between the different participation profiles and digital and socio-civic skills, underlining that the development of digital and socio-civic skills are essential for educating in digital citizenship.</p>

Highlights

Understanding the role and importance of young people in conceptualizations of democracy is ongoing, both in citizenship education research and public debate (Lieberkind & Bruun, 2021)
This paper aims to explore the role of digital and socio-civic skills development, as facilitators for youth participation and analyses the relationship between sociodemographic variables with the participatory profile of participants
Significant differences are observed between the different participation profiles and digital and socio-civic skills, underlining that the development of digital and socio-civic skills are essential for educating in digital citizenship

Summary

Introduction

Understanding the role and importance of young people in conceptualizations of democracy is ongoing, both in citizenship education research and public debate (Lieberkind & Bruun, 2021). Education plays an important role in enabling all children to acquire the skills they need as digital citizens to participate actively and responsibly in democratic society (Richardson & Milovidov, 2019) In their work, they establish the following definition for Digital Citizenship: The ability to engage competently and positively with digital technologies (creating, working, sharing, socializing, investigating, playing, communicating, and learning); as well as, participating actively and responsibly (values, skills, attitudes, knowledge and critical understanding) in communities at all levels (political, economic, social, cultural and intercultural). It is a process of being involved in all lifelong learning settings (formal, non-formal and informal) and defending human rights and dignity (Richardson & Milovidov, 2019, pp.11-12)

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