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Has America lost the distinctive sense of civic involvement that once so impressed Alexis de Tocqueville? Unsettled by this question, sociologist Corey L.M. Keyes of Emory University recently set out to assess current levels of "social civility" in the United States. Contemplating survey data on "the amount and frequency of volunteering, civic association membership, voting, and religious participation in the United States," Keyes looked for signs of "social incivility (or 'a-civility')" in nationally representative survey data collected by the MacArthur Foundation during 1995 and 1996.
After weighing the data, Keyes acknowledges the evidence that "Americans were less involved [in civic responsibilities] at the close of the 20th century than they were in the middle of that century." Yet he rejects as "unwarranted" the conclusion that "the United States has little or no social civility," pointing to data indicating that Americans still "have a great sense of duty and obligation to society." Still, Keyes concedes that social civility does not appear to be "distributed equally in the U.S. population." Marital status, for instance, strongly predicts the level of civic involvement for American adults. In Keyes's data, "married adults were 1.3 times more likely than unmarried adults to have volunteered [to perform social service], and married adults averaged 1.4 times more volunteer hours than unmarried individuals" (p < .01 for both comparisons). Statistical tests also show that parents are almost twice as likely as childless adults to volunteer for social service (Odds Ratio of 1.8; p < .001).
Such data enable Keyes to render a composite portrait of "the exemplar of an adult most likely to volunteer" as "an older and married parent who attends religious services weekly." In contrast, the adult "least likely to volunteer" is "a younger, unmarried, childless adult who never attends religious services." Looking at his topic more broadly, Keyes identifies "the exemplar of civic social responsibility [as] an older and more educated female who is relatively wealthy, married, and attends religious services weekly." Predictably, then, the "antithesis of civic social responsibility is a younger and less educated male who is unmarried (or separated) with little income and does not attend religious services."
Highlighting the "robust" association between religion and marital status in predicting higher levels of social civility, Keyes reports that "religiousness explained upwards of 30% of the relationship of marital status with civic responsibility, social concern for others, and voluntary social involvement."
Keyes acknowledges that some observers fear that the United States is fast becoming "a country of rude, selfish, and uncaring individuals who are overly materialistic and unethical." His findings indicate that any hope of giving America a different and better national character, one which preserves the civic impulses that Tocqueville found so laudable, rests largely on the married and the pious.
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