Specifics of Information and Communication Component of Youth Political and Volunteer Leadership

Introduction. The research novelty consists in empirical justification of one substantive component of the theoretical model of youth leadership by performing comparative analysis of the information and communication component in political and volunteer youth leaders. Methods. At the current stage, the study involved 94 students of Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN) – representatives of socially minded youth, active in the area of political and volunteer leadership. In the process of psychodiagnostics, we used the Internet Behavior Questionnaire by A. E. Zhichkina and the methodology ‘Ways of coping behavior’ by R. Lazarus. Statistical processing of the data was performed using descriptive statistics and comparative analysis with a Mann–Whitney U-test in the IBM SPSS Statistics 22 software. Results and Discussion. We identified common and specific characteristics of the information and communication component of the theoretical model of youth leadership. In the aspect of the information and communication component, youth political leaders and volunteer leaders are equally characterized by constructive coping strategies with active interaction in social media communities and creation of original content in them. Youth political leaders, in comparison with volunteer leaders, are more likely to get somewhat stuck in social media and addicted them, whereas for volunteers, social media act not as an end in itself, but rather as a tool for generating a united helping community. Conclusions. Research results can be used: (a) in developing recommendations for psychological support of youth political and socially oriented volunteer leadership; (b) in preparing training courses for the development of leadership qualities and effective coping skills in the conditions of potentially possible and only partly predictable stress factors of the Internet environment. © 2021, Russsian Psychological Society. All rights reserved.