Coming of Age amidst Unrest: Contours of Political Ideology and Activism Among Young Adults

Background and Purpose: Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z are the most educated and racially diverse cohort in the American adult population. These generations are projected to supersede the Baby Boomer generation hallmarking the largest living adult population in the US, and they make up the majority of the American electorate. Understanding young adults’ impact on American politics by highlighting their latent activism, political and racial ideologies, view of the state, and coalition politics as agents for electoral change is critical (Bialik and Fry, 2019). Young adults are positioned to shift politics and race relations in the US. The objective is to characterize US young adults’ response to racial and social unrest in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death using free-text comments from the COVID-19 Adults Resilience Experience Study (CARES) national dataset.

Methods: This study employs Wave 1 data from the CARES 2020 Project (https://www.cares2020.com/), which focuses on the health and well-being of young adults between the ages of 18-30 years (M = 23) from June 3, 2020-January 20, 2021. The Institutional Review Board at Boston University approved all procedures. Individuals were recruited using social media, email listservs, and word of mouth. Data responds to the prompt “What are your thoughts about the current social climate?” shortly added after Floyd’s death. Applying phenomenological approach to capture participants’ lived experience in the unfolding of the pandemic, we employed the NVIVO qualitative data analysis software to analyze the data. All codes were cross-checked by two other coders to ensure quality and reliability of themes, codes, and subcodes.

Results: Our analytical sample of 303 participants is made up of 16% male, 73% female, 62% White, 19% Asian, 5% Black/African-American, 7% Hispanic/Latinx, 7% other. We draw out four major themes: 1) change (be part of the change, leading to the sociopolitical environment); 2) government and politics (includes wide range of view on the government as a system, the election, political parties, and any calls for reform or change); 3) social climate (covering topics on the pandemic, hostility and divisiveness, and the role of media and news); and 4) emotion (emotions related to mental health symptoms or positive aspects, such as silver linings, positive feelings, and unity).

Conclusions and Implications: We identified the contours of young adults’ political ideologies after George Floyd’s death in 2020. The key finding is that US young adults showed great concerns and strong feelings about the political climate and current government and politics. Our data also revealed the emotional turbulence toward severely polarized America and validated the movement for the emerging activism among young adults. The emerging activism included the political unrest and social climate during the unfolding of racial injustice, government unrest, and anti-Black and anti-Asian discrimination. Calling for the allyship and coalition among the diverse races was also addressed. This research has implications for how young adults are agents for contemporary America's political and racial justice movement.