The quantitative, non-experimental descriptive study reported here sought to measure how being alumni of the Texas 4-H and Youth Development Program influenced their decisions toward community involvement and leadership positions within communities. Former Texas 4-H alumni at least 18 years of age were the assessable population. The study confirms former 4-Hers are using what they learned in the 4-H program by staying involved in their community organizations and holding leadership positions. Organizations listed at the top by most volunteers included: 4-H Volunteer, Church Organization, and Fair Board/Livestock Association/Group. Leadership positions most frequently held include president and secretary.
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Mindfulness is an actively engaged state of mind when an individual is attuned to their surrounding multi-sensory elements. Mindful learning experiences during youth programs may enhance learning and the overall quality of experiences. We developed, executed, and evaluated an end-of-day structured mindfulness experience during a 4-H travel camp. In this paper we summarize the program and its outcomes and share details we believe will assist other youth professionals who may want to build structured mindfulness experiences into their own programs. Through the 4-H Global Travelers program, 20 youth participated in a 7-day travel camp in Argentina. At the end of each day campers gathered to engage in a 20-minute guided reflection of that day’s activities. We projected photographs taken throughout the day to facilitate recall of and reflection on their experiences that day. Campers’ responses to questions about the quality of their experience immediately following each of the mindful reflection sessions showed that sessions were highly absorbing, mindful learning experiences.
Substantial gains have been made in recent years toward understanding techniques for immersing participants in recreation activities. Immersed participants “become physically (or virtually) a part of the experience itself” (Pine & Gilmore, 2020, p. 40); their actions merge with their awareness (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). As competition in the leisure and travel industries intensifies, managers and program evaluators will need efficient approaches to measure the ebbs and flows of participants’ immersion during participation. The latest research suggests it is not sufficient to use a single number to represent the entire flow of immersion during an activity. Rather, measures of salient features of participants’ “experience journeys” may be needed. Experience journey measurement requires measuring participants’ immersion repeatedly, at successive intervals as an activity unfolds. We developed an efficient way of measuring immersion experience journeys and examined relations between select experience journey characteristics (central tendency, dispersion, and pattern) and two outcomes ordinarily valued by park and recreation managers: enjoyment and proclivity to recommend the activity to other people. We collected experience observations (n=1,189) from 150 youth in a summer camp, who completed questionnaires immediately following each of eight structured activity sessions: swimming, climbing, archery, riflery, dancing, kayaking, fishing, and crafts. Participants shared their immersion experience journeys immediately after the activity by drawing a line through a time-series graph representing their levels of immersion as the activity progressed. Immersion at each time point in the experience journey was measured as the vertical distance from the baseline to the drawn line, at each of 12 sequential observations. The questionnaire also included conventional post-hoc measures of enjoyment and proclivity to recommend the activity. Dispersion and pattern of immersion experience journeys were found to be important predictors of enjoyment and proclivity to recommend. Two measures of central tendency (peak-end average and global average) were also strong predictors. Models using global summaries as the measure of central tendency of immersion explained greater variance than peak-end averages until pattern and dispersion were added to the models. Results point to the potential utility of new and efficient questionnaires for monitoring experience journeys and continuously improving recreation programs and events.
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