Abstract
Civic engagement is important for the positive development of adolescents. As such, many youth development programs promote civic engagement, particularly community service and volunteerism. This report is a program evaluation of a youth leadership seminar that seeks to empower adolescents to engage in community service. Using a pre to post mixed-methods design, we evaluated 114 adolescent participants on several psychosocial outcomes. Findings indicated that participants experienced positive change that was consistent with program goals. Quantitative findings demonstrated self-reported increases in areas of cognitive autonomy, moral ideal and social responsibility. Qualitative findings included the important themes of an increased desire to volunteer, confidence, and positive feelings towards self. Implications of these findings and future directions are also discussed.
Highlights
Civic engagement is important to the vitality of a nation and to the individual development of its members (Flanagan & Levine, 2010)
In an effort to further understand the impact of programs that use volunteerism as a component of their positive youth development curriculum, this report is an evaluation of one such youth development program
A two-way repeated measures ANOVA was used to test for any change in cognitive autonomy, from pretest to posttest, using time and the five subscales of the Cognitive Autonomy and Self-Evaluation (CASE) inventory
Summary
Civic engagement is important to the vitality of a nation and to the individual development of its members (Flanagan & Levine, 2010). Adolescent volunteerism is associated with numerous positive outcomes including gains in positive identity development (Pancer, Pratt, Hunsberger, & Alisat, 2007), better academic outcomes (Johnson, Beebe, Mortimer, & Snyder, 1998), increased positive attitudes about one’s ability to impact their community (Janzen, Pancer, Nelson, Loomis, & Hasford, 2010), and increased likelihood of civic engagement in adulthood (Youniss, McLellan, & Yates, 1997) Because of these positive outcomes, volunteerism is considered by many to be important for positive adolescent development, so many programs incorporate volunteerism into their curriculum (Alt, 1997). There are currently 70 different sites across the United States that host these state leadership seminars
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