Presenter
Pamela Paxton, Ph.D., University of Texas-Austin, Population Research Center
Abstract
Since the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1964 and AmeriCorps in 1993, a stated goal of national service programs is to strengthen the overall health of communities across the United States. But whether national service programs have such community-level effects remains an open question. In this study, we test for a relationship using a large, quantitative dataset of AmeriCorps State and National, VISTA, and smaller programs across 1,347 counties between 2005 and 2013.
Using data from Twitter we develop a novel measure of county-level subjective well-being across several dimensions. We run a series of linear regressions to get a broad understanding of how five different categories of AmeriCorps programs influence community subjective well-being. Then we assess AmeriCorps as an intervention in communities with a change score model in a subset of counties over time. Finally, we estimate cross-lagged panels to assess the likely interdependent relationship between AmeriCorps programming and subjective well-being. Results from models show that national service programs do improve community-level subjective well-being and that there is an interdependent relationship between national service programs and subjective well-being.