Anticipated Future Political Participation: A College Student Sample

Data include responses from college students at a single university to sixteen items on the anticipated future engagement section of the Political Engagement Project Survey (PEPS; Beaumont, Colby, Ehrlich, and Torney-Purta, 2006), a survey used for the assessment of political engagement programs in higher education. Data were collected for institutional accountability purposes during required university-wide Assessment Days and used by researchers in a subsequent study to group college students into four classes based on their expected type of future civic and political engagement. Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to categorize students into groups and class differences in gender, race, political ideology, and political knowledge were examined to acquire validity evidence for the 4-class solution, <br><br>The sample consists of 708 college students at James Madison University, a public, master’s level institution in the mid-Atlantic with about 20,000 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students. The 708 college students in the sample completed the PEPS during one of three university-wide Assessment Days (Pastor et al., 2019). All undergraduates at the university are required to attend Assessment Day twice: once as entering first-years and again when they have amassed 45 to 70 credit hours. Data from Assessment Days were combined to create the sample, with 22%, 52%, and 25% of the 708 students being tested in the Fall 2017, Spring 2018, and Spring 2019 administrations, respectively. The distribution of gender and race in the sample aligns with the overall distribution at the university, with 59% of the sample identifying as females and 75% identifying as White. The sample was comprised of freshman (21%), sophomores (58%), and juniors (21%), but no seniors. <br><br>The data file contains:1) the responses to each item (both on the original 1 to 6 Likert scale and in two different dichotomized forms), 2) the latent class assignment from the researchers' 4-class model (using modal assignment), 3) gender (as both a numerical and character variable), ethnicity, scores on two separate measures of political knowledge and political ideology. <br><br>References:<br>Beaumont, Elizabeth, Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, and Judith Torney-Purta. 2006. “Promoting Political Competence and Engagement in College Students: An Empirical Study.” Journal of Political Science Education 2(3): 249-70. doi: 10.1080/15512160600840467.<br><br>Pastor, Dena A., Kelly J. Foelber, Jessica N. Jacovidis, Keston H. Fulcher, Derek C. Sauder, and Paula D. Love. 2019. “University-Wide Assessment Days: The James Madison University Model.” The AIR Professional File Spring 2019: 1-13.<br>