Groups participation and action in a local context

This work pertains to the research about young participation to community life. According to preview literature, participation is been often defined as collective action, whose purpose is to improve social status, power and influence of a whole group, rather than few people (Tajfel & Turner, 1978). Participation is very close to the concept of empowerment, being its determinant but also its effect. Participation often brings about an increase of psychological empowerment, because people become trustful to have a collective influence (Zimmermann, 1990). Thanks to organizations, those are intermediate facilities among citizens and institutions; it's possible to gain role patterns and skill to influence social environment, those are impossible to gain by oneself. Besides participation promotes the awareness of interdependence among individuals, that encourages a virtuose circle of belonging to more inclusive groups. So the collective choice should be strengthened, as long as wider and superordinate collectivities come to replace the preview ones. One of the expressions of participation is emotional climate that concerns the relationship inside a group, and between the in-group and the out-group. Emotional climate is defined as the foremost emotional state that is quite steady during the time, and characterizes a social context, relating to underneath political and social functioning (de Rivera, 1992). Emotional climate, according to participants' tale, provides us an idea of the type of group, and the type of identification. Instead the emotional climates in the meetings with other groups, the trustful relationships, give us information about inclusiveness of the groups, and their flexible boundaries. In an unsafely climate, where distrust in the other individuals is widespread, a competitive attitude is more likely than a cooperative one, preventing a supportive interdependence. The civic and political organizations, even though they are unofficial, deserve to provide citizens with a useful way to overcome individualistic logic and to strive for collectivism. They allow them to cope with individual costs thanks to identification's experience, in both cognitive and emotional dimension. While chances to socialize with a group increase, the identification is promoted, so that the individual benefit becomes more and more similar to a collective, and the own ideals to the group (De Cremer et al., 2008). The social change becomes a principal objective, an ideal more and more internalized by active members of the group. On the other side, to be involved in group activities, even though the group has officially political and social objectives, doesn't mean necessarily to be included in an wider community, and doesn't entail a representation of an own group as a flowing and opened system. The paradoxal effects of participation are noticed as disempowerment (Rich et al., 1995), the suppression of minorities, inconsistent and undemocratic decisions making process, and the increase of chaos and conflicts. These effects are partially determined by in-group bias, those are well-known by the social psychology.The aim of this research was the exploration of reciprocal dynamics among local context, in an Italian city (Naples). In these dynamics, we include participation climate and individual empowerment in young people who are involved in different social groups. In particular, the aim was to explore the relationship between participants and groups, and how they promote their collective action in that community. For this purpose we considered the experiences in the group, the skills developed and their use in the local community. The participants were 45 young people with an average age of 23.30 years (range 18- 25 years). They live in Naples and in its surrounding province. 70% are university students and 30% of them are workers, 50% women and the remaining men. We used a type of theoretical sampling, or step by step sampling (Morse, 2003). The participants are members of formal groups: 13 of sport, 12 of cultural, 10 of religious and 10 of political groups. These groups have a mission to promote changes in their social context and cultural society, in fact they are involved to set up relationships of mutual collaboration in their community. The instrument used for data collection was the semi-structured interview about these subjects: group’s representation, sense of belonging, group emotional climate, relations with the local community. The interviews were audio recorded, with the consent of the participants. Each interview has an average duration of approximately one hour. We used Grounded theory methodology to analyze the interviews to explain some aspects of the phenomenal. We are supported by the software Atlas.ti, that helped us to organize data