Limitations
SECONDARY, ATTRITION
In addition to our measurement of civic engagement, which may not have sufficiently depicted Norway’s concept of dugnad as well as modern digital forms of civic engagement, other limitations related to methodology need to be addressed. Social conscience, one of our ideological dimensions of civic engagement was assessed using items that Lerner et al. (Moreover, the measurement of the action-oriented scale of civic engagement may have some limitations. The measures like “Help a neighbor” or “Contribute as a volunteer” only tap into services that young people render without any form of payment. It is possible that some participants volunteered in some activities and received honorary, a token for their services rather than full payment but could not register it in the questionnaire. At the same time, civic action may not take place as frequently as the ideological forms of civic engagement as reflected in the low mean scores and Cronbach’s alpha. All these are measurement issues that need to be addressed in further research to ascertain an accurate assessment as well as influence of civic action.Furthermore, although a representative sample of upper secondary school students were involved in the study from the beginning, our inclusion of students who only had data from the three waves of data collection might have altered the sample representativeness. Besides, while there were very few differences between those who were included in the study and those who were not, the two groups differed on mental well-being at T1and mental distress at T2, where those included in the study reported higher mean scores. The proportion of females in the study sample was also greater. These group differences that were due to attrition, might probably have biased our findings. Attrition can be a problem in longitudinal studies and is not always easy to address due to the ethical necessity of voluntary participation. However, a follow-up on participants to understand their reasons for dropping out, where possible, can help prevent some of the problems related to attrition.