@article{ref1,
title="Youth narratives on community experiences and sense of community and their relation to participation in an early childhood development program",
journal="Youth and society",
year="2016",
author="Hasford, Julian and Loomis, Colleen and Nelson, Geoffrey and Pancer, S. Mark",
volume="48",
number="4",
pages="577-596",
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). <br><br>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). <br><br>FINDINGS have implications for community-based ECD programs to impact later adolescence SOC and for using narratives to study these effects.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0044-118X",
doi="10.1177/0044118X13506447",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0044118X13506447"
}