| This empirical study examined conditions associated with required school-based community service program benefits from a developmental perspective. It had three main goals: (1) To assess whether the type of program in which the service was embedded and the type of service performed by the student influenced student developmental benefits, (2) To assess whether required community service experience affords students developmental opportunities different from traditional extracurricular activities, and (3) To assess whether mandatory school-based community service programs deter rather than encourage future civic engagement among participants.; Questionnaires were administered to 2,300 students in two Catholic high schools, with contrasting approaches to community service. Participants completed questionnaires in the fall and spring of each academic year over a three-year period. Students were asked to rate the developmental opportunities of their required service experience and their most interesting extracurricular activity. Analyses of variance (ANOVAs) indicated that students who performed social service reported higher developmental opportunity scores than students who performed non-social service (p <.001). Analyses of gender differences indicated that females in both programs were equally likely to participate in social versus non-social service, as well as males in the service learning program. Males who participated in the community service program were more likely to do non-social service versus social service (78% and 22%, respectively).; A repeated measures ANOVA revealed that overall, student ratings of required service developmental opportunities were higher than their extracurricular activity developmental opportunity ratings (p = .01). However, this turned out to be true only for students who performed social service (p = .002).; Longitudinal analyses indicated that higher developmental opportunity ratings of required service experience predicted volunteer service one year later (p = .002). This finding suggests that mandatory community service does not necessarily engender resentment and discourage future civic activity as critics have suggested.; It is concluded that social service provides students with greater developmental benefits than non-social service and that social service is more likely to foster an on-going commitment to volunteering. A comparison of the present findings to those previously reported provides considerable support for the claim that community service programs provided in the context of a service learning program that is based upon an ideology that clearly explicates why community service is important are more likely to benefit students than programs that are not well integrated into the academic curriculum and lack a clearly stated justification for the role of community service in a civil society. |
