COMMUNITY SERVICE AND WELL-BEING IN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

Past literature on community service has shown that community service produces many positive effects, however most of the literature were either on seniors or western-focused. The current paper aims to examine the benefits of community service on university students in Singapore in three main categories: Gratitude (i.e. dispositional gratitude, gratitude feelings), Well-being (i.e. life satisfaction, global positive emotions, global negative emotions, social-economic well-being) and Prosociality (i.e. charitable donations, empathic concern). It was hypothesized that community service will lead to higher levels of effect and change on positive variables and lower level of effect and change on negative variables. We predict that overseas community service will have greater effects than local community service, which in turn have greater effect on non- community service. Data was collected through surveys done by 369 National University of Singapore students, aged 19 to 26. Results shows that community service leads to positive benefits in dispositional gratitude, gratitude feelings, life satisfaction, positive emotions, socio-economic well-being and charitable donation. Overseas community service effects posed significant effects on participants, while local community service did not. The study supported the prevalence of these variables which can be considerations for future research on community service