Long-term consequences of youth volunteering: Voluntary versus involuntary service

Abstract

Despite the renewed interest in youth volunteering in recent years, there remain major gaps in our knowledge of its consequences. Drawing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we examine the long-term effects of youth volunteering on the civic and personal aspects of volunteers’ lives. Our results suggest that youth volunteering has a positive return on adult volunteering only when it is voluntary, and that net of contextual factors neither voluntary nor involuntary youth service has a significant effect on adult voting. Regarding personal outcomes, our findings indicate that the psychological benefits of youth volunteering accrue only to voluntary participants, whereas both voluntary and involuntary youth service are positively associated with educational attainment and earnings in young adulthood. Taken together, these results lend support to the case for youth volunteer programs, though the civic benefits of these programs appear to be less dramatic than generally suggested.

Impacts of Adolescent and Young Adult Civic Engagement on Health and Socioeconomic Status in Adulthood

“…The ESs for these links were strong and suggest that civic engagement may have an important function in social mobility. Our findings add to previous literature documenting associations, although often weak, between various forms of prosocial adolescent activity, including volunteering, and subsequent SES (Barber, Eccles, & Stone, 2001;Kim & Morg€ ul, 2017), which may be accounted for by selection effects (Pilivian & Siegl, 2014). These findings are among the first to assess the function of voting and activism on social mobility.…”

“…Activism might affect SES through individual‐level pathways, for example, helping people build skills and get jobs that can affect educational attainment and higher personal earnings, whereas volunteerism and voting might additionally affect SES through social pathways such as plugging people into to new, perhaps high achieving or higher SES social networks, which can influence mate selection and thus higher household income. Indeed, Kim and Morgül's () finding that volunteerism predicted higher educational attainment and personal earnings whether it was mandated or not supports the idea that volunteerism might operate via helping youth build social skills and social ties. It will be interesting for future work to understand mechanisms involved in each form of civic engagement and social mobility attending to how activism might differentially predict SES indicators such as income and education.…”

“…Cross‐sectional disparities in civic engagement by SES are clear, but less is known about longitudinal links between civic engagement in late adolescence and adult social class. In Kim and Morgül's () study, volunteerism in late adolescence predicted educational attainment and personal earnings in adulthood. Importantly, this was true regardless of whether the volunteerism was mandated or not, which suggests that selection effects do not fully explain positive links between volunteerism and SES.…”

“…However, given that adolescents and young adults generally experience relatively good health compared to older adults, the effects of volunteerism on health during the teenage and young adult years are difficult to document, whereas potential long‐term cumulative health effects into adulthood are more straightforward to observe. In a recent longitudinal study drawing on data from the National Study of Adolescent to Young Adult Health, volunteerism in late adolescence predicted fewer depressive symptoms in adulthood among those who participated voluntarily (Kim & Morgül, ). Although this study did not account for various factors that predict volunteerism (i.e., selection effects), findings suggest an important role of motivations in links between volunteering and health.…”

Curriculum requirements and subsequent civic engagement: is there a difference between ‘forced’ and ‘free’ community service?

“…In the conclusion to their 2005 paper, Metz and Youniss suggest that ‘the case for or against mandatory service as a means of promoting civic development is still an open question’ (p. 416). Since then, evidence suggests mandatory service programmes can exert such an influence on the timing and nature of volunteering (Helms ), that longer‐term effects are minimal (Kim and Morgül ) but positive findings are equally plentiful (Hart et al ; Planty et al ). We wish to address this ‘open question’ by exploring the conditions under which mandated secondary school service is related to subsequent civic engagement.…”