Unpacking the link between family socioeconomic status and civic engagement during the transition to adulthood : Do work values play a role?

Abstract

We investigated whether the link between family-of-origin socioeconomic status (SES) and civic engagement in young adulthood is mediated by youth’s work values, i.e., the desired characteristics of their current or future jobs. We used data from a Finnish study: 2004 (age 16–18, NT1 = 1,301); 2011 (age 23–25, N T2 = 1,096); and 2014 (age 25–27, NT3 = 1,138). A lower family SES in 2004 was negatively related to youth’s civic engagement in 2014. Lower family SES predicted the importance that youth attached to extrinsic job rewards (e.g., good pay) in 2011, but not the importance of intrinsic job rewards (e.g., learning opportunities). Extrinsic work values, in turn, predicted lower civic engagement in 2014, above and beyond sociodemographic and personality characteristics. Conversely, intrinsic work values predicted higher civic engagement. Thus, extrinsic, but not intrinsic, work values partly mediated the link between SES and youth civic engagement.