Civic Development and Community Service
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.
- 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. - 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. - 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). - 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). - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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.
