Monday, October 28, 2002

A story released today by Ascribe News reports that a new study conducted by researchers reveals that children who grow up in poverty and in single-parent homes are less likely to volunteer as adolescents.

The research is important because most studies of disadvantaged youth focus on their negative behaviors, such as delinquency and early childbearing, said Daniel Lichter, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University.

"The concern is whether disadvantaged youth, such as those who live in poverty, become socially responsible and civic-minded young people," Lichter said. "While there has been plenty of research about negative activities among disadvantaged youth, we need to learn more about positive behaviors and how to promote them."

The results of this study, while preliminary, show that growing up disadvantaged may harm the development of prosocial behaviors such as volunteerism, but there are ways to overcome these obstacles, Lichter said.

Lichter conducted the study with Michael Shanahan of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Erica Gardner of Pennsylvania State University. The results were published in a recent issue of the journal Youth & Society.

The results showed that almost one-third of both boys and girls (31 percent of both groups) had engaged in some volunteer work in the past two years. About one-quarter said their activities were purely voluntary -- not mandated by schools or other organizations.

A 1995 study that included a broader range of teenagers from across the country reported that 70 percent of high school seniors had participated in community affairs or volunteer work in the past year.

Results clearly showed that children who lived in poverty and in single-parent homes were less likely than others to spend time volunteering, Lichter said. These children may have too many difficulties in their own lives to devote time to helping others or may have become socially disaffected as a result of the hardships while growing up.

"Our results point to the importance of schools and churches for providing a pathway for young adults to volunteer," Lichter said.

Because of the nature of the data, Lichter said they could not examine prosocial behavior outside of volunteering, such as giving to charity or helping care for others in the community. "Young adults with disadvantaged backgrounds may be expressing positive values in ways that we couldn't capture from this data," he said.

However, this study provided a starting point to examine how growing up disadvantaged may influence prosocial behavior among adolescents, Lichter said.