Urban America as a context for the development of moral identity in adolescence

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 1998 by Daniel Hart, Robert Atkins, Debra Ford

Voluntary Service in American Adolescents

Eight hundred and twenty-eight adolescents and young adults answered the questions relevant for the determination of voluntary service. Only those responding to these questions were eligible to be included in the analyses reported below. Of those responding to the questions about community service, 19.2% (159) reported that they had participated in voluntary service in the previous 2 years. This reflects substantial involvement in the community and belies global characterizations of adolescents as uninvolved and self-centered.

Predicted Outcomes: Rates of Problem Behaviors

In 1994, participants were asked to report for the previous year whether or not they had been involved in one of 17 problem behaviors (e.g., "gotten into a fight") or situations that resulted from problem behavior (e.g., "had to bring your parents to school because of something you did wrong"). Adolescents involved in voluntary service were less likely than other adolescents to be involved in five of these (stealing something worth more than $50, using force to get something, attacking someone to inflict serious injury, breaking into a building, and having had to bring one's parents into school, all ps [less than] 10). The magnitude of all the associations between voluntary service and problem behaviors is quite small, which is consonant with the multidetermined nature of deviant behavior.(2) As suggested by the model, then, moral identity appears to be associated with, though not strongly predictive of, good individual outcomes.

Longitudinal Predictors of Voluntary Service

Social structure. Voluntary service, as predicted by the model, is clearly related to income: Those who volunteered came from households with an average total net family income(3) between 1986 and 1994 of $34,800, whereas those who were not involved in voluntary service were from less affluent homes (with a mean income of $24,000). Given that poverty tends to be concentrated in minority neighborhoods, it is not surprising that involvement in voluntary service was less frequent among minority adolescents: 40.2% of White adolescents (76 of 189) participated in voluntary community service, while only 15% of Hispanic adolescents (27 of 176) and 16.9% (56 of 331) of Black adolescents were involved in community service ([[Chi].sup.2] = 22.6, p [less than] .01).

Family support. Family support is measured in the NLSY by the Home Observation for the Measurement of the Environment-Short Form (HOME-SF). The HOME-SF consists of a series of items intended to assess the cognitive, social, and emotional resources available to the child in the home. In the analyses here, the standard score for 1992 is used as a global index of family support.(4) The correlation of family support in 1992 with voluntary service in 1994 was r = .20, p [less than] .01, suggesting that adolescents whose parents could furnish them with cognitive, social, and emotional resources were more likely to become involved in voluntary service.