Connecting the Dots: A Methodological Approach for Assessing Students' Civic Engagement and Psychosocial Well-Being

Choosing one of the myriad of assessment instruments by which to measure civic engagement and psychosocial well-being is relatively easy. The hard part is choosing the one—or two, or three—that will actually connect the most salient elements of civic engagement and psychosocial well-being to the goals of a particular course, project, or institution. The important thing to remember in any discussion of the connection between civic engagement and psychosocial well-being is that neither of these concepts is unidimensional. Each is a composite. One's civic engagement, like one's psychosocial well-being, is an amalgam of multiple strands of measureable outcomes related to individual thought, perception, and action. How, then, can the linkages between students' civic development and their psycho­social well-being be meaningfully defined and assessed at the campus level?