Giovani volontari fra tradizione e innovazione: un'indagine tra gli studenti dell'Emilia Romagna

As witnessed by current international debates, volunteering is changing. The paper juxtaposes the concepts of classical "collective" volunteering – collectivist and with an ideological twist – and "reflexive", which points to new forms – individualistic, characterized by the search for self-fulfillment and intangible assets. If the former contributed to structure the identity of the volunteer, the latter is bound to the breakdown of individual personalities, fragmented into a chaotic series of social roles lived in watertight compartments. Yet several studies reveal that even among new, “reflexive” volunteers the ideal size and the construction of identity remain a shared and appreciated value. The essay will analyze the volunteering experiences of respondents (by way of a questionnaire administered to a sample of 1,195 students enrolled in various Emilia-Romagna high schools during the academic year 2013/2014, built to represent the proportions by province and type of school), to find confirmations of the transition between traditional and contemporary ways of being a volunteer and the persistence, within them, of a connection with the sense of self and identity building.