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Situated within the Italian context and aligned with the panel’s call for multimethod, indicator‑oriented research, this paper presents the design and initial psychometric validation plan of Questionario sull’Attivazione Politica di Rizomi — a youth‑focused instrument that operationalizes the construct of Political Activation beyond formal schooling and conventional civic metrics. Building on Rizomi’s ongoing mixed‑methods action-research (2023–2025) in Genova and La Spezia, the instrument translates a Theory of Change that reframes youth participation as the evolving capacity to: imagine oneself in institutional roles, recognize and prioritize lived urgencies, approach decision‑making spaces, and deliberate the consequences of candidacy, including the right to elettorato passivo [1]. Conceptually, the work dialogues with comparative scholarship on youth engagement and competence frameworks, keeping agency, situated opportunities, and the deliberation‑to‑action passage at center stage [2–5]. Methodologically, the article reports the initial phase of scale development, focused on content and face validity and targeted item revision.

First, a Content and Face Validity Analysis ensures coverage of the theoretical domain—six attitudinal dimensions identified in the pilot (political imagination; awareness of urgencies; perceived distance from institutions; perceived knowledge of institutional functioning; resources/knowledge to run; perceived consequences of running)—and prioritizes respondent acceptability and linguistic clarity for 25–35 year‑olds in urban Italy. Expert appraisal and cognitive review are used to test definitional breadth and interpretability in relation to established models of democratic competences and youth engagement [2–5,6]. This approach follows classical recommendations in measurement design, using content representativeness and clarity as prerequisites for valid score interpretation [7,8].

Second, Item Revision is guided by pilot evidence: items with low variability (ceiling/floor effects) and weak internal structure in specific factors—especially “Urgency” and “Institutions”—are reformulated or pruned to increase discriminative power and reduce semantic overlap [1]. Proxy analyses conducted on the pilot (73 Likert items) indicate mixed reliability across blocks, with stronger internal coherence for “distance/discomfort” and “how to run” modules, and weaker coherence for “urgency” and parts of “institutions,” justifying focused rewriting and consolidation (e.g., merging candidacy intentions by probability/timing rather than by institutional level) [1]. This iterative refinement is consistent with best practice in construct specification and item reduction before confirmatory testing [7].

The contribution advances the indicator agenda in three ways: (a) it specifies a psychometric roadmap for a youth political‑activation scale that complements survey and administrative sources; (b) it theorizes activation as a situated progression detectable via hybrid indicators (self‑representation in public roles, situated institutional knowledge, threshold‑to‑action intentions), capturing experiences that often elude large‑scale measures [3–5]; and (c) it reports early quantitative associations — e.g., competence perceptions predicting local candidacy intentions — supporting the instrument’s predictive promise and policy relevance for non‑sectorial, integrated youth policies for democratic agency [1].