ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a portrait of the civic orientations of Taiwanese adolescents and analyze the forces that are currently shaping such orientations. We draw on unique data from the Taiwan Education Panel Survey, a national panel survey of representative samples of high school students and their parents and teachers since 2001. The adolescents under this study are the 1988-89 birth cohort, which offers a particularly useful vantage point for addressing the influence of the transnational cultural frameworks. This is a generation that was born right after the lifting of martial law and arrived at adolescence when Taiwanese society had opened up transnationally. In the two decades since then, Taiwanese citizens witnessed the transformation from a society under martial law to one open to the world, with democratic elections, and a wide range of transnational connections. This generation of Taiwanese adolescents grew up in a milieu of family, peers, and institutions whose cultural practices were more diverse and more dynamic than ever before. Mediated by diffuse mass media, transnational cultural frameworks and practices are shaping the values and outlooks of adolescents, just as are their parents, schools, and peers who are part of the pervasive socializing environment of adolescents. Although we are interested in examining the interplay between local contexts (family and school) and transnational dynamics in the formation of civic orientations, we realize that this is a difficult challenge. The influence of transnational frameworks, particularly through global mass media, is highly decentralized and diffuse. Families, schools, and peers do not exist in a vacuum. Transnational media influence is intertwined with the influences of the family, school, and peers. Such influence may multiply rapidly through social contagion dynamics. We thus take a combination of direct and residual approaches to assessing the extent to which the family, school, peers, and diffuse mass media account for the variation in adolescent responses to civic scenarios. While we have multiple indicators for the influences of the family, school, and peers on civic orientations, we interpret the unexplained variation as a crude estimate of the cumulative impact of the transnational mass media. In a way, the estimate is a conservative one because the measured influences of the family, school, and peers arguably mediate some of the media influence.
