Professor Laurent Reyes
School of Social Welfare
Maria Miramontes, Undegraduate Research Fellow
Re-Defining Civic Participation from the lens of Latine and Black American Older Adults
Project Abstract
By 2030, Latine and Black Americans are expected to be the largest non-White groups of older adults. In the past 20 years, older adults' civic participation has received considerable attention. Particularly, formal volunteering and voting have been the focus of most scholarship, national initiatives, and policies concerning older adults' civic participation. Consequently, other civic activities are unrecognized, especially civic participation among non-White populations. This phenomenological study, which began in 2020, aims to understand better how civic participation is experienced among Latine and Black American Older Adults in the context of structural oppression, socio-political environments, and physical changes across the life course. Phenomenology seeks to study participants' narratives about their lived experiences as a way to understand the nature of the phenomenon. To this end, the project is conducting two in-depth interviews to collect current and lifetime experiences of civic participation and document elicitation techniques to deepen participants' reflections and trigger memories. We draw from an intersectional life course perspective to contextualize participants' experiences across the life course and within the historical and current socio-political space in which they live and participate. The study's findings will be used to re-conceptualize civic participation in later life and develop measurements of civic participation for future studies that more accurately reflect the experiences of older Latine and Black adults. This research's findings can also inform policy and programmatic efforts to support and expand ongoing civic participation efforts among historically marginalized older adults.