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Civic Development and Community Service
Creating Citizenship: Youth Development for Free and Democratic Society

Abstract of Panel Presentation

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James Youniss
Catholic University of America

It is smart to be skeptical about claims that community service is an effective means to promote citizenship in American high school students. Although during the 1990s, two-thirds of contemporary students report that they have done service in the past year, only about 25% have done service on a regular basis and in manner that could possibly be considered conducive to citizenship. Nevertheless, service has definite potential for developing a sense of civic agency and social responsibility because when service is done in a serious and concerted manner, its effects are lasting and indicative of ideal democratic behavior. Some distinctions are helpful for clarity in any discussion of service and its effects. Consider a recent report from the National Association of Secretaries of State which concluded that today, while more youth than ever are doing service, fewer youth than ever are voting or participating in normal political processes. (Note: The proportion of youth who vote is no lower now than it was in 1972). In fact many students are doing service, but the kinds of service they do are hardly conducive to promoting civic participation. The most common kinds of service are tutoring peers, baby sitting/day care, coaching, or partaking in episodic events for charitable causes. Voting is hardly the appropriate outcome measure for these activities. One rightly fears that results as the NASS's might undermine the good that well-designed service can promote. But before throwing out the baby with the bath water, we should take a second look at what constitutes sound service and why it has positive developmental potential.
  1. School-based required service. Our data show that the positive effects are obtained when service is managed and integrated into the academic curriculum. In a study we just finished, the quality of service done by students differed according to programmatic structure. In School A service was a mandatory part of the religion curriculum, as action on behalf of social justice was made essential to religiousness. School B also required service, but treated it more in the sense of Noblesse Oblige. Students in School A were more likely than students in School B to do higher quality kinds of service in which they directly helped people in need, v. doing functionary duties.

  2. Social identity. We have proposed that service is one means to stimulate adolescents' identity development. Adolescents seek meaning which is transcendent, that can give present experience credible interpretation, connect it to a respectable past, and promise an ideal future. When service is framed as part of a social tradition, either religious, political, or moral, youth are allowed to partake in continuation of a transcendent historical system. Thus, a curriculum that bases service in the teaching of a valid tradition, has potential for promoting identity in a way that classroom instruction alone or free-form service, does not have.

  3. We propose that quality service done for good cause is a vehicle for integrating youth into society, in its social-historical sense. In this regard, service can promote citizenship whether that means participating responsibly in government (e.g., voting) or in movements that advance particular causes or interests (e.g., advocacy or demonstrating).

  4. Volunteer service. About 25% of youth do volunteer service on a regular basis beyond school requirements. We find that a different language is needed to describe this form of service. In our data, volunteer service is unrelated to school program, but is grounded in adolescents' daily social environment. Factors that predict quality of volunteer service are: Family (whether parents do service; what they do; perceived monitoring and support from parents); peer (whether friends do service; what they do; perceived mutual support); religion (attend religious service; perceived importance of religion; membership in church youth groups); extracurricular activities (the pattern and kinds of activities youth do); and other links with community organizations (membership in youth organizations; clubs).

  5. Although these factors could be individually weighted in a regression format, they might be better seen as interlocking pieces of a total environment that promotes an active stance toward society. Students who do high quality service likely have parents who do the same service and possibly do it with them. So are they likely to have peers who do this same service with them. These adolescents likely participate with parents and friends in church or community groups that directly provide services or are conduits to service delivery sites. Viewed in this way, service is a means of integration into the community and into ideological systems that deliberately offer access to forms of transcendent meaning that are needed to nourish youth's developing social identities.

  6. Two other pieces of evidence help to clarify our argument. Students who do quality service involving direct delivery of assistance to people in need, also show a particular kind of religious orientation. These students associate religiousness with concern for poverty, unemployment, and other social problems. Students who do other kinds of service, e.g., work as functionaries (addressing envelops for a charity's fund-raising) are more apt to view their own religiousness in terms of a personalized relationship with God and less in terms of social justice.

  7. One might argue that this is like a cat chasing its own tail; students who do high quality service are already prone toward a social-political outlook. This is the familiar personality-selection effect position. To check this interpretation, we utilized our longitudinal data to compare students who in their sophomore or junior year did high quality service but then shifted to lesser service, with students who started with lesser but, in junior or senior years, moved up in quality. We found that changes in quality of service were associated with changes in political behavior-attitudes as the former students declined in stated likelihood of partaking in unconventional political behavior (protesting for a cause) whereas the latter students significantly increased.

  8. Why is this kind of service effective? We speculate as follows. Many youth today are relatively sheltered from the meaner sides of life. Service has the potential to introduce them to these hard realities in the form of real persons who are not media images, but people like themselves, with feelings and needs. Moreover, service provides constructive ways to address these problems, allowing youth to discover their potential as agents that contribute to society whether by feeding hungry people or soothing elderly persons and stemming their loneliness. These features of quality service allow youth to gain a sense of agency and responsibility, while abstract social issues are reduced to reality in the form of needy persons they meet and serve.

  9. Conclusion. Service can enhance development when it affords adolescents opportunities to experience themselves as members of collective historical movements. By acting within such frames, youth can judge themselves as participants in ideological streams of thought and, thus, can clarify the stances they might take toward society in the future. In this sense, youth are offered chances to join in on the making of history as they adapt traditions to the circumstances their generation presently faces.

  10. Policy implications. If youth seek to become integrated into society, our duty is to provide them with appropriate means to test themselves as historical actors. If we do not, plenty of alternatives are available, many we might not like. See how neo-Nazi groups arise where there is lack of employment and opportunities to enter the normative system, for example, in Germany or the Balkans. See U. S. urban areas where youth cannot find work and turn to criminal activities and gangs to find movements worth their energy and intelligence.

  11. The media and much of our own social science dwells and thrives on youth problems to such a degree that hyperbole passes for reality - e.g., "super predators," "generation X," or "epidemic of adolescent violence." These may be ways of attracting audiences or research grants, but they do a disservice to today's youth. These youth are not achieving less well in school, using more drugs, committing more crime, or being any less involved in normative society than their parents' youth generation of the 1970s. The data simply will not support such groundless claims. The fact is that today's youth are open to the challenge of entering society as moral, socially responsible citizens. Our duty is to provide them with the resources that will foster their development and help them in their task to re-make the society of the 21st century. It is our obligation to recognize their talent and to afford them the means to do this constructively.