| Abstract: | Recruiting intervention agents is a promising procedure to increase the reach of community-safety programs. Finding active and effective agents, however, has not always been a systematic process. One recent approach named Actively Caring (AC) hypothesizes that self-esteem, belongingness, empowerment, extroversion, and reactance constructs predict willingness to help others. This approach was tested as a mechanism for finding successful agents. Urban college students (N = 360) were asked to (a) complete a survey of AC measures and (b) volunteer to promote fire safety to others by distributing commitment cards requesting fire-safe behaviors. In all, participating volunteers (N = 107) motivated commitments from 278 households. These households represented many communities of the urban area, giving evidence that college students may be useful resources for promoting safe behaviors. However, the AC approach was not as effective as selected individual psychosocial and demographic variables in predicting active and effective agent behaviors. Implications for the AC approach, and other prosocial behavior models, for selecting intervention agents a priori are discussed. |
