Helping behaviors (e.g., helping a sick friend, volunteering) are important forms of community involvement and likely change with age and life context. Yet, trajectories of community helping from adolescence through early adulthood have rarely been examined. It is also unclear how the roles of family, friends, and social attitudes might foster the development of helping behaviors across these years. We report on a study of community helping in a Canadian youth sample, across five intervals over a 15-year span, beginning at age 17 ( N  = 416). Helping displayed a quadratic trend, decreasing into the mid-20s, and then rebounding somewhat by 32. Social responsibility and salience of friends' prosocial moral values positively predicted age 17 community helping, whereas parents' moral values predicted less decrease in helping over this timeline. These findings add to an understanding of moral influences and social responsibility, in the potential shaping of youths' community helping behaviors.

Helping behaviors (e.g., helping a sick friend, volunteering) are important forms of community involvement and likely change with age and life context. Yet, trajectories of community helping from adolescence through early adulthood have rarely been examined. It is also unclear how the roles of family, friends, and social attitudes might foster the development of helping behaviors across these years. We report on a study of community helping in a Canadian youth sample, across five intervals over a 15-year span, beginning at age 17 (N = 416). Helping displayed a quadratic trend, decreasing into the mid-20s, and then rebounding somewhat by 32. Social responsibility and salience of friends' prosocial moral values positively predicted age 17 community helping, whereas parents' moral values predicted less decrease in helping over this timeline. These findings add to an understanding of moral influences and social responsibility, in the potential shaping of youths' community helping behaviors.

Despite figures showing the growth of mandatory community service programmes, there is mixed empirical evidence of their effectiveness. This paper addresses the relationship of mandated community service to one of its purported aims: subsequent volunteerism. It compares current volunteerism among four university student cohorts: those doing no service in secondary school, those volunteering with no requirement, those volunteering both before and after the introduction of a requirement, and those introduced to service through a requirement. The analysis indicates that (1) students who were introduced to service through a mandated programme exhibit current levels of engagement no greater than non-volunteers; (2) this relationship stems largely from the different service experiences of our four cohorts and relates to the fact that service satisfaction and duration, as well as background variables account for current levels of civic engagement. The findings suggest that mandatory service programmes might well be failing the very population they seek to target, particularly in weaker, less structured programmes.

Better Beginnings, Better Futures is an evidence-based early childhood initiative that promotes the healthy development of children and families in economically disadvantaged communities. The Better Beginnings model involves the development of community-driven programs through resident involvement that are integrated with existing services, universally accessible to all children and families in a community, focused on prevention, and ecological in nature. In this paper, we describe a pan-Canadian knowledge transfer strategy involving attendance at workshops designed to build the capacity of participants to develop Better Beginnings initiatives in their own communities, and the impacts of the workshops on participants. Process evaluation data were obtained from participants in each Canadian province and territory immediately following the workshops (k=12, N=271). In addition, a smaller sample (n=54) completed a follow-up telephone interview 3months later. All components of the knowledge transfer strategy were well-received and rated highly by participants. Workshop participants indicated increased knowledge of the Better Beginnings model and high levels of satisfaction with the workshop. In the follow-up evaluation, participants indicated strong intentions to use the information they had learned about Better Beginnings to advance the well-being of children and families in their community. We discuss the lessons learned from the knowledge transfer initiative and provide recommendations for advancing knowledge transfer of programs for children and families in context.

This study examines community engagement in youth and emerging adulthood from a narrative identity perspective, based on analyses of a longitudinal data set of 72 participants from ages 17 to 32. At ages 26 and 32, participants told narratives about a key community experience from their personal lives, which was rated for six dimensions. In addition, questionnaire measures of community involvement and general identity status development were administered at ages 17, 26, and 32. We found that patterns of community involvement at age 17 predicted levels of community involvement and qualities of community narratives at ages 26 and 32 and that community narratives were significantly correlated with concurrent measures of identity maturity and community involvement. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.

Many strategies guide knowledge-sharing to enhance uptake of evidence-based programs in practice, though few have been designed specifically for community settings. We highlight the importance of understanding and evaluating knowledge mobilisation in community settings and present a framework for evaluating knowledge mobilisation that captures short-term knowledge use as it relates to community stakeholders’ goals. To examine the utility of this framework, we applied it to the Pan-Canadian knowledge mobilisation activities of Better Beginnings, Better Futures, a community, university and government collaboration to support child development to its full capabilities. Participants included 31 community stakeholders who had attended a Better Beginnings workshop in one of six Canadian provinces and territories. Qualitative phone interviews were conducted to examine the extent to which knowledge mobilisation activities met participants’ learning needs, and how participants had applied the knowledge gained. Findings demonstrate that most participants had used the information, although the ways information was used varied greatly based on the community context. This application of the knowledge mobilisation framework shows it is useful for capturing diverse forms of short-term knowledge use in community settings. Lessons learned through the evaluation were used to refine the framework. The implications of this framework for academic researchers engaged in undertaking and evaluating community knowledge mobilisation are discussed.

This comparative study examined how participation in an early childhood development (ECD) program, Better Beginnings, Better Futures, for children (ages 4-8) relates to sense of community (SOC) in later adolescence (ages 18-19). Youths’ stories ( N = 96) about community experiences, collected by semistructured, open-ended interviews, were quantitatively coded for several narrative dimensions (specificity, positivity, prosocial content, and meaning-making) and for elements of SOC (membership, influence, needs fulfillment, and shared emotional connection). Findings show a significant positive relationship between all narrative dimensions and the total SOC score. Better Beginnings youths’ stories ( n = 64) were significantly higher on specificity and shared emotional connection than comparison youth ( n = 32). Findings have implications for community-based ECD programs to impact later adolescence SOC and for using narratives to study these effects.

This study examined the long-term cost-savings of the Better Beginnings, Better Futures (BBBF) initiative, a community-based early intervention project for young children living in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods during their transition to primary school. A quasi-experimental, longitudinal two-group design was used to compare costs and outcomes for children and families in three BBBF project neighborhoods (n = 401) and two comparison neighborhoods (n = 225). A cost-savings analysis was conducted using all project costs for providing up to 4 years of BBBF programs when children were in junior kindergarten (JK) (4 years old) to grade 2 (8 years old). Data on 19 government service cost measures were collected from the longitudinal research sample from the time the youth were in JK through to grade 12 (18 years old), 10 years after ending project participation. The average family incremental net savings to government of providing the BBBF project was $6331 in 2014 Canadian dollars. When the BBBF monetary return to government as a ratio of savings to costs was calculated, for every dollar invested by the government, a return of $2.50 per family was saved. Findings from this study have important implications for government investments in early interventions focused on a successful transition to primary school as well as parenting programs and community development initiatives in support of children's development.

This chapter introduces the concepts of citizenship and civic engagement. A critical element of both concepts is the notion of active citizenship, in which individuals are actively involved in the life of their country and community through participation in things such as volunteering, neighborhood organizations, or political work. The chapter discusses why such involvements are important for the well-being of individuals and communities and provides examples of how theory and research in different areas of psychology, such as developmental psychology, community psychology, and social psychology, can inform our understanding of citizenship and civic engagement. The chapter presents an integrative theory that considers the factors that initiate civic participation and those that sustain it, from both an individual and systems perspective. The chapter ends with a description of how the book is organized and the key values and perspectives that the author brings to bear on the subject.

Better Beginnings, Better Futures is an early childhood initiative focused on promoting healthy developmentof children and families in economically disadvantaged communities. The Better Beginnings approach isecological and holistic, community-driven, integrated with existing community services and supports, anduniversally available to children aged 4-8 within communities in which it is offered. The Better Beginningsinitiative effectively illustrates the concept of wellness as fairness through its efforts to create more justsocial conditions and its connection to both procedural and distributive justice, the two principles offairness outlined by Prilleltensky (2012). Through the development of programs that support children,parents, families, and the community as a whole, Better Beginnings initiatives are able to promotechildren's development by building community capacity to create healthy and positive environments forchildren. This paper provides an overview of the Better Beginnings, Better Futures initiative from its outsetin 1990 to the present, with a view towards examining the ways in which knowledge generated from suchinitiatives can be transferred to other communities.

Undergraduates (N = 2,823) at 6 universities were surveyed longitudinally to examine the relevance of student home setting on the transition to university. Preliminary results indicated that rural students seem less likely to attend large, ethnically diverse universities. Hierarchical linear models revealed that "proximal rural" students reported better social adjustment than did urban students in November; however, this relationship was accounted for by living in residence. Similar results were found in March but not mediated by residence. Proximal rural students also reported greater institutional attachment than did urban students in November. The findings highlight important research issues pertaining to students' adjustment to university.

For high school community service programs to have a positive impact on subsequent civic engagement, students must volunteer in a sustained manner and must evaluate their volunteering experiences positively. Using a survey with 1,293 respondents and 100 semistructured interviews with past participants of the mandatory community service program implemented by the Ontario provincial government in 1999, the authors identify how and why students generate positive evaluations of community service requirements and whether the diversity of implementation or the mandatory nature might account for negative reactions to volunteering. The authors discuss the significance of these findings for academic debates about community service and for discussions about the ways in which public policy can promote the civic engagement of young people.

Open-ended responses of an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of 593 12- to 19-year-olds (M = 16 years old, SD = 1.59) were analyzed to explain why some people in the United States are poor and others are rich. Adolescents had more knowledge and a more complex understanding of wealth than of poverty and older adolescents had more knowledge and a more complex understanding of both. Controlling for age and demographics, adolescents had a deeper understanding of inequality if they were female, from better educated families, discussed current events in their families, and attended schools with classmates who discussed current events in their families. Higher parental education and attending schools with classmates who discussed current events with their families increased the likelihood of structural attributions for poverty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

This study examined the long-term impacts of the Better Beginnings, Better Futures project, a universal, community-based prevention program. Generativity was studied as an indicator of positive mental health, using a narrative analysis of youths’ stories about turning points in their lives. A quasi-experimental design was used to compare youths aged 18–19 who participated in Better Beginnings when they were 4–8 (n = 62) and with youths from comparison communities who did not participate in Better Beginnings (n = 34). Significant differences between the 2 groups were found on 2 measures of generativity. The findings suggest the utility of adopting a narrative approach to evaluate the long-term outcomes of prevention programs for children and youth.

ABSTRACTBetter Beginnings, Better Futures is a large‐scale, multi‐year, longitudinal research‐demonstration project designed to reduce children's problems, promote healthy child development, and enhance family and community environments in three economically disadvantaged communities in the province of Ontario, Canada. The initial intervention was implemented from 1993 to 1997 and focused on families with children from 4 to 8 years of age in their first 4 years of schooling (from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 2). This study examined the long‐term parent, family and community programme outcomes, 15 years after the start of the intervention, when the young people who had participated in the intervention as young children were 18 to 19 years of age. Comparison of intervention communities with matched non‐intervention communities showed a mix of outcomes. Although few significant differences between intervention and comparison communities were found with regard to parents' health and family outcomes, there was evidence that parents in the intervention communities were engaging in fewer risk behaviours, had lower levels of depression and had more community involvement than parents in the comparison communities. These results suggest that the intervention did have some positive long‐term effects on youths' parents and on their community environments. Results are discussed with respect to the importance of considering family and neighbourhood contexts in the development and evaluation of prevention programmes. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Weight, eating attitudes, and depression were assessed in male and female students over the 4 years of university attendance, and the relation of weight changes to eating attitudes and depression was explored using self-report measures (Restraint Scale, EDI, CES-D) collected at six time points during the university years. Results showed that, in general, weight increased between year one and year four of university attendance for both men and women, with men gaining an average of 4.1 kg and women gaining an average of 3.2 kg. Weight gain was associated with increased body dissatisfaction and negative eating attitudes among women, whereas weight loss was associated with decreased negative eating attitudes. Well-being and eating attitudes of men who gained weight did not differ, either initially or at year four, from those of men who remained weight stable, whereas men who lost weight reported higher negative eating attitudes both initially and at year four. Weight gain, therefore, appears to be associated with negative outcomes, including greater preoccupation with eating and weight, for women, but not for men, while weight loss improves the attitudes only of women.