ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – A University of Michigan study has found that teens engaged in activism become better critical thinkers and more politically active.

“Community-based activism serves as a key consciousness-raising system that supports youth to recognize, negotiate and challenge oppression in their lives,” said Matthew Diemer, U-M professor of education and psychology. “What we see here is these young people benefit and flourish instead of being harmful (sic) or indoctrinated.”

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The study examined three dimensions of “critical consciousness”—defined by education magazine Kappan Online as “the ability to recognize and analyze systems of inequality and the commitment to take action against those systems”— over 500 adolescents from cities around the United States. This research was recently published in the journal Child Development.

“We’re directly paying attention to inequality instead of avoiding talking about inequality or pretending it doesn’t exist,” Diemer said. “These settings exploit (sic) these topics with young people and foster the capacity to act on inequality.”

A similar study published earlier this year in Youth compared the costs and benefits of youth activism. Researchers from the Department of Education and Counseling at Villanova, the ACLU, Human Development and Family Science at Purdue, and the Department of Social Welfare at UCLA contributed to the report.

“While it can generate positive health and wellbeing, activism can expose youth to greater mental and physical risks, including harassment, arrest, violence, and even death,” the researchers wrote. “Among some youth activists, a culture of guilt, or not sacrificing enough for the cause, can develop. Spending more time on activism can come at the expense of other necessary functions, such as sleep, exercise, and schoolwork. Burnout has emerged as a pressing concern among youth activists.”

The study found that youth activists reported experiencing more benefits than costs and recommended that further research be done on how to minimize costs while “heightening a sense of belonging” for young activists.

U-M’s Diemer agrees there is more work ahead.

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“Now, we would like to have a sense of the best practices of these [activism] organizations,” he said. “We see that these settings are effective and impactful and knowing more specifically what was happening that led to that change would be next.”