Faith, Family and Service Among UDM Students

Abstract

Service is an important facet of my life and the lives of many students at UDM. In this thesis, I wanted to study the connections for students between their faith and family backgrounds and their attitudes and participation in service. To do this, I interviewed several of my friends and created a survey about these topics which I distributed to UDM students online via the “All Students and Graduate Students” email listserv. I received 261 valid responses, and I analyzed the survey data with the software SPSS to look for statistical correlations in the data. I learned that building relationships with clients was key to good service-learning outcomes among students. In addition, I found that if students take an increased number of service-learning classes, then they will have better perceptions of service and gain greater awareness of social justice issues. I also gained useful suggestions from students on how to improve the service-learning process. Student’s motivation to serve appears to come primarily from wanting to contribute to and connect with their communities. I found some of the primary reasons why students participate in service to be that they had participated in it before UDM, and that they enjoyed it and made it a priority. I observed that students who enjoy service also prioritize it, and vice-versa. I also learned that students feeling that that are making a difference is important to their prioritization and enjoyment of service; this makes sense in light of students viewing service primarily as a method of engaging with their communities. I learned that prayer and scripture-reading help to explain why students enjoy service at UDM. In some of my statistical analysis, I found that faith variables used together with service variables proved more valuable in explaining variations in the data. This, along with prayer and scripture being important for good service outcomes, helps to give us a picture of the ways in which faith and service interact with one another. I also found that students became more or less devoted to their religious practices in college, and that they became even more polarized in this behavior in graduate school. I found little statistical data to support the idea that parental involvement spurs students on to participate in service later in life, though parents having a good attitude about service did prove to be important for explaining why those students who did service with their parents enjoy service. This data can be used as is to gain a picture of the complex relationships between faith, family, and service, to improve the service-learning process, and as a jumping-off point to do further survey and statistical analysis on service-learning students at UDM and other schools.