How people understand the meanings of terms related to social and civic engagement values

The values of social and civic engagement have long been objects of theoretical interest, at least from John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century to Robert Putnam today. To investigate them empirically, social researchers employ a wide variety of methodological tools and approaches. However, few researchers have also dealt with problems concerning how people understand the meanings of terms related to the social and civic engagement values. In fact, these terms are so general and vague that might not be consistently understood by people. For this reason, we have conducted a research to investigate the meanings that people give to some of the most recurring terms in studies about social and civic engagement. The method employed to explore these semantic fields is the cognitive interviewing which is widespread among social researchers in order to study the psychological aspects of responses, especially the comprehension processes people put into action when they try to understand a question. As a qualitative research method, the cognitive interviewing allows social researchers to delve into the meanings concealed by the quantitative methods. The context of this research was the city of Rome in Italy. We asked 17 subjects, recruited by quota sampling, to probe the meanings they gave to the following terms: «political engagement», «institutional trust» and «religious engagement». The results of this study show that these terms were not consistently understood by people. This suggests that the concepts related to social and civic engagement values cannot be investigated with standardized questions but must be explored in depth with qualitative research methods.