Social action in young adults: Voluntary and political engagement

The present study examines the antecedents of social action (Snyder & Omoto, 2007), understood as voluntary action and political action, by operationalizing Penner’s constructs (2004). We affirm the essential homogeneity between these two forms of social action and their antecedents. The study has a twofold aim: 1) testing the identified antecedents on the volunteer participants by means of discriminant analysis, and 2) testing the same variables on youth engaged in politics. Participants were 706 young people - engaged and not engaged -distributed throughout Italy – aged 19-29 (M = 22.36, SD = 1.10). The instrument used was a self-report questionnaire. The findings reveal that several variables discriminate between engaged and not engaged youth. They also show the presence of several areas of overlap between variables considered in the engaged groups (political and voluntary action).