Links between moral identity and political purpose during emerging adulthood

Abstract

We examined the links between moral identity?the centrality of moral principles to identity?and political purpose during emerging adulthood. We analyzed data from two waves of a longitudinal study of civic purpose. T1 surveys were collected before high school graduation, and T2 surveys were collected 2 years later. We categorized people (N = 1,578 at T1 and N = 480 at T2) into political purpose groups based on the person-centered perspective and then performed a multinomial logistic regression analysis to test whether moral identity was associated with categories of political purpose. The findings from our study indicate that moral identity at T1 is linked with the maintenance and formation of T2 political purpose.