Abstract

The dataset contains a textual corpus of references in psychological academic literature concerning youth participation, engagement and active citizenship. The references were retrieved from the electronic database PsycINFO, which is one of the most important bibliographic sources for international literature in psychology. The research was carried out on 30 August 2016, using each of the following terms: “active citizenship”, “civic engagement” or “political engagement”, “civic participation” or “political participation”, “activism”. The key terms that were used were chosen by the authors as most relevant in youth participation literature that treats particularly the public civic and political sphere. These were required to appear together with words denoting young people: “youth*” or “young*”, “teen*” or “adolescen*” and delimited to titles, abstracts, keywords or subjects. The analyzed literature consists of 1777 selected entries published between 1990 and mid-2016. The dataset includes the following information: specific identifying information about the text itself (type/year/title/author/journal or book title/author affiliation); as well as information on the search terms used to retrieve the publication; and finally, the abstract/summary retrieved from the PsycInfo database. The corpus was used in specific lexicometric content analysis and the dataset allows its replication or further textual analyses.