The impact of volunteer service on moral education performance and mental health of college students

PLoS One. 2024 Apr 16;19(4):e0294586. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0294586. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Background: Moral education in colleges and universities is an important part of the talent training system, including moral education curriculum, moral education practice, mental health education. Volunteer service is a public welfare act in which volunteers volunteer their time, knowledge, property, technology, with the ultimate goal of helping others and serving the society without personal compensation. As an innovative form of moral education practice in colleges and universities, college students' voluntary service is of great significance in promoting the reform and innovation of moral education, enhancing the affinity, appeal and influence of moral education, and building a positive psychology for college students.

Subjects and methods: As an effective carrier of moral education practice in colleges and universities, voluntary service is helpful to enhance the effectiveness of moral education practice and construct the positive psychology of college students. This project is based on the actual situation of college students participating in volunteer services, and collected the volunteer services of 4545 college students in Zhejiang Province. Through model construction and data modeling, the correlation between college students' participation in volunteer service and their moral education performance and mental health was analyzed, and the basic path and guarantee measures to promote the role of volunteer service in moral education and positive psychological construction were deeply explored.

Results: From the correlation analysis of students' voluntary service participation, moral education performance and voluntary service motivation, students' attributes are determined according to their voluntary service participation, so as to predict their moral education performance and mental health level.

Conclusion: College students' voluntary service is partially positively related to their moral education performance and mental health. In order to improve students' moral education performance and mental health, we can optimize the participation frequency, participation duration, participation ways and type structure of voluntary service, constantly increase the participation frequency of voluntary service, increase the duration of voluntary service, broaden the participation ways of voluntary activities, and enrich the types of voluntary service activities.

MeSH terms

  • Health Status
  • Humans
  • Mental Health*
  • Morals*
  • Students
  • Universities
  • Volunteers

Grants and funding

2022 Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Annual Topic "Research on Innovation and Countermeasures for Improving the Effectiveness of College Moral Education in the Age of Big Data"(Grant:22NDJC146YB); Shaoxing Philosophy and Social Sciences Research "Fourteenth Five Year Plan" 2021 Ideological and Political Special Project "Research on the long-term mechanism of strengthening college students' ideological and political education from the perspective of financial media"(Grant: 145S014). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.