The Short-Term Impact of Inter-Community Volunteering Activities and Soft Skills Training on Self-Reported Social Cohesion Values : Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Lebanon
Despite its growing popularity, evidence that volunteering enhances civic values and social cohesion among different communities remains limited in developing countries. This study presents novel evidence from Lebanon on the impact of offering a vo...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/676801546874918189/The-Short-Term-Impact-of-Inter-Community-Volunteering-Activities-and-Soft-Skills-Training-on-Self-Reported-Social-Cohesion-Values-Quasi-Experimental-Evidence-from-Lebanon http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31134 |
| Summary: | Despite its growing popularity, evidence
that volunteering enhances civic values and social cohesion
among different communities remains limited in developing
countries. This study presents novel evidence from Lebanon
on the impact of offering a volunteering program that
consisted of inter-community volunteering activities and
soft skills training on self-reported social cohesion values
in the short term. The results show that youth who were
selected to participate in the program were more likely to
report higher tolerance values as well as a stronger sense
of belonging to the Lebanese community roughly one year
after the completion of activities. The results show that
selection into the program had no impact on improving
volunteers' soft skills that were thought to contribute
to social cohesion. This finding implies that the mechanism
for improved social cohesion values most likely came from
the program's innovative feature, which required 20
percent of selected youth to come from communities outside
where the area where the project was implemented. Selection
into the program had no impact on other secondary measures,
namely, employability and employment outcomes. The results
should be interpreted with caution, given study design
limitations that relate to the nonrandom assignment of youth
into the treatment and comparison groups, as well as the
presence of nonrandom attrition between the two tracked time periods. |
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