Aborted access to civic engagement

Project description

Due to the publicly postulated increase in the importance of civil society, civic engagement is becoming increasingly relevant for social participation. At the same time, socially disadvantaged groups and minorities are underrepresented in this engagement. While there is a great deal of research on the uptake of civic engagement, there is hardly any research on the drop-out. Similarly, engagement research focuses largely on individual motives, while there are few studies on how the respective field of engagement and socially shared patterns of interpretation shape the course of engagement. The aim of the research project was therefore to reconstruct the processes that lead to the discontinuation of civic engagement. The question of the significance of social differences in the termination process was investigated using the example of people with a migration background who have terminated their involvement in charities as organizations of the German majority society. The termination was understood in connection with and as the end of an access process. Access and discontinuation processes were researched as a socially produced reality in the interaction between the environment of engagement and those interested in engagement. For this reason, the perspective of individual volunteers who have discontinued their involvement was compared with that of groups of actively involved volunteers. The former was collected via topic-centered narrative interviews, the latter via group discussions.

A key finding of the research project is that the discontinuation processes described are significantly influenced by the specific field of volunteering in welfare work and the specific activities carried out in it. Here, those involved have experiences that bind them to the commitment in a special way, as well as those that repel them from the commitment: On the one hand, care and assistance enable special interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, welfare is characterized by economization, which is met with opposition and rejection by those involved. Discontinuation processes in the field of welfare are therefore characterized by a particular tension.

The analysis of the significance of migration, on the other hand, has shown that Topics associated with migration and migration background, such as foreign language skills, difficulties in accessing the labor market and experienced attributions of difference, shape the narratives - however, they are only made relevant by the interviewees for the inclusion of the BE and as positioning in relation to the interviewer. With regard to the dropout processes, the specific experiences in the field of welfare are more relevant.