부산대학교 도서관

Helping behaviors (e.g., helping a sick friend, volunteering) are important forms of community involvement and likely change with age and life context. Yet, trajectories of community helping from adolescence through early adulthood have rarely been examined. It is also unclear how the roles of family, friends, and social attitudes might foster the development of helping behaviors across these years. We report on a study of community helping in a Canadian youth sample, across five intervals over a 15‐year span, beginning at age 17 (N = 416). Helping displayed a quadratic trend, decreasing into the mid‐20s, and then rebounding somewhat by 32. Social responsibility and salience of friends' prosocial moral values positively predicted age 17 community helping, whereas parents' moral values predicted less decrease in helping over this timeline. These findings add to an understanding of moral influences and social responsibility, in the potential shaping of youths' community helping behaviors. Highlights: There is little research on how youth's helpfulness changes from adolescence through adulthood.It is unclear how moral and social influences relate to community helping across young adulthood.Youth's helping behaviours decreased from age 17 to the mid‐20s and then rebounded in the 30s.Social responsibility and salience of friends' prosocial moral values were linked to more helping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]