Positive youth development, positive psychology, and sociopolitical anti-oppressed development imply that civic involvement effectively enhances adolescents' well-being.
FREMONT, CA: Young adults are happier when they are involved in their communities. Civic engagement improves well-being in general and socially excluded groups. A mediation model including self-efficacy, finding meaning in life, and exploring identity gets used to looking at how positive attitudes toward civic engagement, skills for civic engagement, and political awareness affect the life satisfaction and hope of the participants. Positive attitudes toward civic engagement, skills for civic engagement, and political understanding indirectly affect how happy and hopeful the participants were with their lives.
Social workers, developmental psychologists, and health care workers all try to help the well-being of young adults who are socially isolated. Most efforts to help these young adults focus on giving them money, making jobs better, giving them better places to live, making education and job training more accessible, and promoting health. Skills help in identity exploration in civic engagement and political awareness. Clinicians need to know about the possible benefits of civic engagement for the health and well-being of socially excluded groups. Interventions have moved away from this deficit model and toward a resilience paradigm focusing on well-being and positive development paths.
The shift in focus is based on the fact that more and more people realize that a person's strengths, not just the absence of mental or physical illnesses, are crucial to their best functioning. Popular theories in the field of positive youth development, positive psychology, and sociopolitical anti-oppressed development all suggest that exercising civic engagement is an excellent way to improve the well-being of young people. Positive Youth Developmental (PYD) theory, for example, focuses on the vital role that Youth's involvement in their communities plays in shaping their well-being, as shown by the five Cs: competence, confidence, connection, caring, and character.
Helping others and community involvement can speed up happiness, life satisfaction, and hope by improving pathways and agentic thinking. Young people can fight for structural changes that can improve people and communities and give them more power. Most studies focus on the links between civic engagement and well-being based on data from American students or older adults in groups. Few people consider how being active in the community helps young adults' well-being. Much less is known about the paths for socially excluded people, like young women from low-income families who get help from the welfare system and have fewer chances to do good civic work.
