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Youth Narratives on Community Experiences and Sense of Community and Their Relation to Participation in an Early Childhood Development Program

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Youth & Society

Published online on

Abstract

This comparative study examined how participation in an early childhood development (ECD) program, Better Beginnings, Better Futures, for children (ages 4-8) relates to sense of community (SOC) in later adolescence (ages 18-19). Youths’ stories (N = 96) about community experiences, collected by semistructured, open-ended interviews, were quantitatively coded for several narrative dimensions (specificity, positivity, prosocial content, and meaning-making) and for elements of SOC (membership, influence, needs fulfillment, and shared emotional connection). Findings show a significant positive relationship between all narrative dimensions and the total SOC score. Better Beginnings youths’ stories (n = 64) were significantly higher on specificity and shared emotional connection than comparison youth (n = 32). Findings have implications for community-based ECD programs to impact later adolescence SOC and for using narratives to study these effects.