This meta-analysis assessed the effect of community service on adolescent development and the moderation of this effect by reflection, community service, and adolescent characteristics to explicate the mechanisms underlying community service effects. Random effects analyses, based on 49 studies (24,477 participants, 12-20 years old), revealed that community service had positive effects on academic, personal, social, and civic outcomes. Moderation analyses indicated that reflection was essential; the effect for studies that include reflection was substantial (mean ES = .41) while community service in the absence of reflection yielded negligible benefits (mean ES = .05). Effects increased when studies include more frequent reflection and community service, reflection on academic content, and older adolescents. These findings have implications for understanding and improving community service.

The main aim of this study was to examine whether an assessment of implicit bullying attitudes could add to the prediction of bullying behavior after controlling for explicit bullying attitudes. Primary school children (112 boys and 125 girls, M age=11 years, 5 months) completed two newly developed measures of implicit bullying attitudes (a general Implicit Association Test on bullying and a movie-primed specific IAT on bullying), an explicit bullying attitude measure, and self reported, peer reported, and teacher rated bullying behavior. While explicit bullying attitudes predicted bullying behavior, implicit attitudes did not. However, a significant interaction between implicit and explicit bullying attitudes indicated that in children with relatively positive explicit attitudes, implicit bullying attitudes were important predictors of bullying behavior. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.Keywords Explicit bullying attitudes . Implicit bullying attitudes . Interaction explicit and implicit bullying attitudes . Bullying School bullying is a large societal problem and is already evident among primary school children. Studies on this population show that 3-27% of the children bully, and 9-32% are bullied once a week or more (Berger 2007). Bullying has also been shown to have large negative consequences for the well-being of victims and bullies (Berger 2007;Scholte et al. 2007), which stresses the importance of targeting bullying behavior together with the factors that are related to bullying.Various factors have been found to contribute to the extent to which children bully other children. Research evidence indicates that social factors such as group membership and peer pressure, as well as individual, personal factors such as physical strength, aggressiveness, and empathy influence bullying (Rigby 2004). Another often studied individual factor is children's attitudes towards bullying. Attitudes are predictors of all kinds of spontaneous and deliberate social and non-social behavior (e.g., Glasman and Albarracin 2006) including bullying behavior (Salmivalli and Voeten 2004). Attitudes can be defined as general and enduring, concrete or abstract evaluations of a person, group, or issue and can be based on beliefs, emotions and behavior (cf. Petty and Cacioppo 1986).In attitude research, a distinction is made between implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes are impulsive, spontaneous, uncontrolled emotional reactions and evaluations. In contrast, explicit attitudes refer to deliberate, reflective, controlled, consciously self-reported evaluations (Gawronski and Bodenhausen 2006). Dualprocess models assume that there are two different modes of information processing that underlie implicit and explicit attitudes. According to these models more automatic, impulsive, associative processes underlie implicit attitudes and more controlled, reflective processes underlie explicit During the research project on implicit and explicit bullying attitudes all authors were working at ...

This study examined the relative importance of best friend's and parents' volunteering and civic family orientation (combined with open family communication) in adolescent volunteering, and the moderating effect of age. Results, involving 698 adolescents (M age = 15.19; SD = 1.43), revealed that adolescents were more likely to volunteer when their best friend and parents volunteered, and volunteered more frequently when their family had a stronger civic orientation combined with more open family communication. Clear age differences were found: when adolescents get older, friends become more important for whether they volunteer, and the family's civic orientation becomes important for their volunteering frequency. An implication of these findings may be that, depending on adolescents' age and the aspect of volunteering, interventions may focus on targeting parents' or friend's civic behaviour to stimulate adolescent volunteering.

The aim of this study was to explain adolescents' volunteering in terms of their morality and identity and to examine the moderation effect of gender and age in this process. Data were collected among 698 Dutch adolescents aged 12 to 20 (M = 15.19; SD = 1.43). Adolescents' moral reasoning was positively associated with understanding moral issues and thinking about public responsibility towards these issues. In turn, moral understanding, along with being personally committed to act upon moral issues, were positively associated with identity. Extending the number of identity contexts tended to be related to being more likely to volunteer and to more volunteering involvement. Adolescents' identity integration was not related to how likely they were to volunteer, and was negatively related to their volunteering involvement. Clearer effects were found when differentiating between adolescent gender and age groups. Future research could examine this process over time, along with additional factors that may further explain adolescents' volunteering, and examine their age and gender specific effects.

This study examined the effect of community service program-quality on changes in adolescents' intentions to volunteer. Based on the literature, volunteering intentions were expected to increase by programs with high quality community service activities (e.g., instructive activities) and educational activities including reflection. Adolescents (N = 361; M age = 15.67; SD = 0.74) divided in three groups were compared: community service students who were randomly assigned to a reflection intervention (N = 172) or no intervention (N = 142), and students who did not perform community service (N = 47). Data were collected before and after community service, and a half year after finishing community service. Results showed that adolescents' volunteering intentions increased when performing high quality service activities. When performing low quality service activities, volunteering intentions declined, unless adolescents received the reflection intervention. Thus, high quality activities and reflection are key community service characteristics for stimulating adolescents' volunteering intentions.