Memory of the Quality of Group Experiences During Childhood and Adolescence in Predicting Volunteerism in Young Adults

The link between extracurricular activities during childhood and adolescence and civic engagement in the subsequent stage of life is theoretically strong but empirically weak. This is due to the lack of longitudinal studies that account for this relationship and the absence of retrospective studies to confirm it. In this article, we investigate, through the participants’ memory, the essential aspects of the quality of group experiences by which children and adolescents learn to become responsible citizens committed to social issues. More specifically, we investigate whether young adults currently committed to volunteer social work also remember as children and adolescents successful experiences participating in diverse recreational groups. We analyzed the psychometric properties of an index designed to retrospectively assess the quality of these experiences. The results indicate that the unifactorial structure of the index remains stable in the two Italian samples used and in the cross-national comparison with a third Spanish sample.