Participation in youth center activities: A sequential specificity approach

Youth centers both develop youths' sense of citizenship and their social integration and discourage their delinquency. These centers, numerous in Hong Kong, provide essential social services for youths. Promoting youths' continuous participation in youth centers is, therefore, a recurrent issue in Hong Kong, A model - the sequential specificity model - appears to be useful in addressing this goal. This model differentiates the sequence of participation and the corresponding specific and nonspecific determinants. Knowledge and the attitude toward youth center services are specific determinants hypothesized to affect participants' participation intention more strongly than nonparticipants'. Analysis of data from a sample of 1,755 high school students in Hong Kong supports this hypothesis.