The Adolescent Unbound: Unintentional Influence of Curricula on Ideological Conflict Seeking

Abstract

Conflict seeking is celebrated in advocacy of civil disobedience as a commitment of youth to transcendent principles that compel activism. Conflict avoidance, however, is far more prevalent as an explanatory theme in political socialization research. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine undercurrents of defiance in the seemingly controlled and disciplinary environments of the home and the classroom. We propose that high schools and families—as overlapping spheres of interpersonal political communication—can engender ideological conflict seeking during election campaigns as activity conducive to moral-political identity development. Ideological conflict seeking was modeled as inclination to openly disagree, which fosters support for confrontational activism. Evidence was obtained from multiple interviews of student-parent dyads across two election cycles in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. In validating a theoretical model confined to the ordinary political communication that occurs in classrooms and households, we highlight ideological conflict seeking as a focal concept deserving a more explicit role in the theory of civic identity development.