FAQ

Yes, the Civic Profile is private. You will not be asked to share your name when taking the Civic Profile, and your responses will not be shared in a way that will allow others to identify any individuals taking the Civic Profile. Providing any personal information (such as name or email) is completely optional and is not required to take the quiz. We do not sell, rent, or trade personal information. Quiz response data may only be shared in aggregated or anonymized form for educational research purposes. For full details on how data is collected, used, and protected, please see our Privacy Policy.

We have made a deliberate effort to avoid bias. The team that developed the instrument reflects a range of different ideological perspectives, and we conducted multiple rounds of interviews and user feedback to assess whether the language, framing, or underlying concepts were perceived as politically skewed. While patterns of civic values and engagement are correlated with political orientation, the categories themselves are politically neutral. Individuals across the ideological spectrum can hold any of these values and participate in any of these forms of civic engagement.

Our team is collaborating with our institutional partners to develop classroom-ready materials that support educators in integrating the Civic Profile into their lessons. These resources will be available on the Resources tab, where you can currently find a sample lesson and other supporting materials.

The concepts and measurements in the Civic Profile were shaped through conversations with stakeholders, a review of existing civic frameworks, and multiple rounds of pilot testing.  The Values and Engagement sections combine pre-validated survey items with original batteries, which were tested and validated together across successive pilots. The Knowledge section draws on a subset of questions from the pre-2025 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Naturalization Test, adapted to an online multiple-choice format.  The result is a focused assessment of core civic values, institutional knowledge, and engagement patterns.

For each Values index, the raw score is calculated as the mean of a user’s responses across all items in that battery. The percentile score indicates the percentage of respondents in our nationally representative sample who scored at or below the user’s score.

For our national dataset, Engagement indices are estimated as confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) factor scores for each latent construct, rescaled to range from 0 to 1. For online users, Engagement scores are computed using a closely aligned but more computationally efficient approach: a loading-weighted composite score for each latent factor. Specifically, standardized CFA loadings are used as weights, and each respondent’s score is calculated as a weighted mean of their observed item responses. The correlations between the national CFA factor scores and the loading-weighted composite indices are very high: 0.971 for Institutional Actors; 0.971 for Community Builders; and 0.968 for Change Advocates. 

Technical documentation on survey methodology and index construction will be released with the 2025 data report.

We partnered with YouGov to survey a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults in December 2025. The data displayed in the Dashboard reflect the distribution of each outcome index, weighted to align with national population benchmarks. Detailed technical documentation on survey methodology, weighting procedures, and index construction will be released with the 2025 data report.

Our three categories are by no means intended to be a comprehensive or exclusive way of mapping civic behaviors. Our three-item framework was informed by research and by more comprehensive typologies, including the Pathways of Public Service and Civic Engagement, the Campus Compact Social Change Wheel, Ekman and Amna’s civic engagement typology, Kahne and Westheimer’s three types of citizens, and others.