Opportunities for Moral Education Researchers to Use Archived Civic Education Data with a Social Justice Emphasis

Abstract

In the peri-pandemic period many researchers can anticipate challenges in collecting data to study issues of social justice as they relate to moral education. Even after strict COVID restrictions are loosened, many school authorities will be unwilling to allow students to spend class time filling out research surveys because of the need to make up for lost months of schooling. Archived and freely-available datasets from survey studies of civic- and social-justice-related topics can be accessed and analyzed by moral education researchers during this transitional time. Data about social justice issues can be accessed from the CivicLEADS.org data archive at ICPSR (University of Michigan) and from national assessment agencies in Latin America. These data can be used by researchers in many types of analysis and to address a variety of research problems.