Community service and political identity development in adolescence

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 1998 by Miranda Yates, James Youniss

The data come from an investigation of a year-long service learning program. Students were enrolled in a mandatory junior-year religion course on social justice at a Catholic high school, "St. Francis." As part of this course, they served four times (minimum 20 hours) at the same downtown soup kitchen for the homeless. The investigation included 160 students currently enrolled in the program as well as 121 alumni. (See Youniss & Yates, 1997, for more details about the methodology and findings.)

Study Participants and Data

The 1993-1994 juniors came from middle- and lower-middle-class families. The student population was 95% Black, 1% White, and 4% other minority. Students were 54% female and 46% male, with the majority of students (71%) aged 16 at the beginning of the study. The most frequently represented religious backgrounds were Catholic (35%) and Baptist (35%); 50% attended religious services on a weekly basis and 26% never attended. Forty-five percent of the students had participated in service before the beginning of the junior year. Of those students with prior service experience, most said that they had participated less than a year (45%) or one to two years (21%) and only 17% indicated that they were currently performing service outside of school.

An array of information-gathering methods were implemented over the school year. First, questionnaires were completed during the first week of class and at the final exam. The questionnaires took 10-15 minutes to complete and included items on community service, religious background, and extracurricular activities. Second, essays were written and collected after each quarterly visit to the soup kitchen. Students used a standard one-page form and were asked to describe their most recent service experience at the soup kitchen. The essays had been a part of the course curriculum for several years. Third, the first author ran quarterly discussion sessions (N = 42) in which groups of 10-15 students exchanged ideas about their experiences at the kitchen. Fourth, participant observations by the first author were made in the classroom (40 hours) and at the soup kitchen (104 hours).

Private and Public Reflections on Service and Society

Previous analyses of the data from this study have reported on how students' reflections touched upon issues of agency, social relatedness, and moral-political awareness. In particular, analyses of the essays and discussion groups indicated not only that service stimulated students to reflect on societal problems and their own sense of responsibility, but also that these reflections became more complex and encompassing over the course of the year. Furthermore, it was found that students who expressed emotional engagement in their service in the forms of sadness, feeling good about helping, and anger were more likely to make more encompassing reflections and to express a commitment to continued community service after the end of the program (Yates & Youniss, 1996a; Youniss & Yates, 1997). For example, a student who described feeling angry about seeing a child in line for food was more likely to discuss the connection between the soup kitchen and the affordable housing in a subsequent essay than a student who did not express anger in an essay.