Sociological analysis of attitudes of youth towards volunteering activities: The sample of İzmir Youth Centers

This research focuses on how young people experience volunteering in public youth centers and how they make sense of volunteering in their own lives, depending on their youth identity, within a historical, factual and conceptual framework. In this direction, which profiles of youth are the ones engage in volunteering and in what ways, with which motivations they reach to the volunteering activities and what kind of material and moral benefits they receive in their lives by doing volunteering activities are studied through social capital theory. During the research, aspects such as the former conditions of the "Youth Center" phenomenon, the debates on volunteerism in Turkey, the relationship of youth work carried out in Turkey as well as the European Union policies and the effects of volunteering in a public center were examined. In the research, semi-structured interviews were conducted within 16 young people between the ages of 17-30, who participated in volunteering activities in the Alsancak Havagazı Youth Center affiliated with the local government in İzmir. By using the qualitative research model, participant observation was made for five months and active participation was develop through different roles in the activities. Lüküslü's conceptualization of the "youth myth" was used to understand youth research and the historical view of youth works in Turkey. Böhnisch's concept of "coping with life" aimed to examine how young people's experience of volunteering provided them comfort. Additionally, the research findings revealed that volunteering in an institution requires obligations such as regular participation and timely presence, unlike performing personal voluntary actions, and this situation affects the frequency of participation causing stratification among the volunteers. The finding that, young people who could participate more often depending on their living conditions can derive more meaningful benefits from the relevant activities in the youth center and that the volunteering activities carried out in the youth center allows to differentiate the young people as "project producers" and "project beneficiaries". This situation is explained by Bourdieu's concept of "reproduction".