Student perceptions of social justice and social justice activities

Abstract

Encouraging students to engage in activities that actively seek to promote social justice is a goal of many educators. This study analyzed college student perceptions around social justice and related activities in a medium-sized, urban university in the United States. Students’ open-ended responses to questions assessing their perceptions of social justice and related social justice activities were coded, and a set of categories were developed. After establishing adequate inter-rater reliability for these categories, the associations between these categories with Global Belief in a Just World Scale, Symbolic Racism Scale, Neosexism Scale, and Perry Public Service Motivation Scale were explored. The results and implications of these analyses are presented and discussed.