Stages of Civic Identity Formation

Abstract

It has been noted that the formation of civic identity occurs by stages and takes place in the process of civic socialization, which is proposed to be regarded as the process of gaining social experience of civicism by an individual (norms and values of civic culture, civic behavior patterns, knowledge and ideas about the state, citizenship, etc.) through the inclusion into the organizational environment of the state and the system of social relations with other citizens. There are four stages of civic identity formation: informationalperceptual, content-normative, value-semantic and integration-identification. It has been shown that the informational-perceptual stage (covering pre-school and early school age) is a stage of initial awareness, immature awareness, characterized by the presence of fragmentary and non-systematic representations and knowledge about citizenship, state, etc. formed as a result of recording of messages (mostly implicit ones) regarding civic norms and values, observation of the civic behavior of others. The content-normative stage (encompassing secondary school / teenage age) is characterized by the formation of ideas about the social role of a citizen, awareness of the system of civil rights and duties, ideals and values, as well as the formation of perceptions of oneself as similar to the citizens of own state and different from the citizens of another state (self-categorization); the system of civic guidance begins to emerge. The value-semantic stage (covering adolescence) involves the identification and justification of the value-semantic foundations of own life concept, determination of the interest direction, in particular regarding the socio-political sphere, formation of ideas about oneself as a citizen and a value-estimating attitude towards civic affiliation. Integration-identification stage (covering the early adulthood period) is characterized by crystallization, formation of attitude (cognitive, affective, conative), value-semantic, spatiotemporal (self-realization) and active-transforming (subject activity) aspects of the personality that contributes to the new mental formation (personal structure) – civic identity.

Keywords

• civic identity
• civic socialization
• stages of formation
• civic subjectivity
• self-categorization