Review article
Youth development programs: risk, prevention and policy

Portions of this paper were presented at the Society for Adolescent Medicine meetings, as the Gallagher Lecture, March 1999, in Los Angeles, California.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S1054-139X(02)00421-4Get rights and content

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Defining the elements of a youth development program

In this section we seek to clarify the vagueness surrounding the actual workings of youth development programs by suggesting three defining characteristics: (a) program goals, (b) program atmosphere, and (c) program activities. We identified these characteristics from writings about the potential benefits of the positive youth development approach 2, 3, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. This literature builds a case for the effectiveness of the youth development approach using research on adolescent

Mapping the elements of youth development programs to practice

These three principles of youth development programs describe their promise. In this section, we turn to assessing the reality. To what extent are these elements present in the diverse group of 48 programs promoting positive outcomes for youth? The first step in answering this question was to determine how to measure programs’ goals, atmosphere, and activities from the program descriptions included in the evaluation literature.

Examining the findings from the evaluation literature

In this section we move beyond the question of whether or not programs can promote positive youth development to the question of how they do. Ideally, synthesizing the findings from these empirical evaluations would allow us to identify which programmatic elements work best for improving the lives of youth. Then, we could provide a blueprint of the necessary and optional elements for a successful youth development program. Such a list would create a clearer definition of a youth development

Conclusions

To move the definition of youth development programs beyond the vagueness inherent in defining them as programs that help youth develop, we identified three features, program goals, atmosphere, and activities, that distinguish youth development programs from other types of youth programs in the literature. We then used the findings from the best of the empirical program evaluation literature to see if these three features differentiate successful programs.

At a minimum, program goals and

Future directions

The operational definitions we created to determine program goals, atmosphere, and activities can serve as the basis for the development of survey or observational measures for use in program evaluations. Program descriptions tell us only so much about how the program works. Our understanding of why some programs are better at promoting youth development than others would be vastly improved by the development and inclusion in evaluation studies of measures of the quality of the atmosphere

Acknowledgements

Support for this paper came from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. We thank Christina Borbely for her assistance in preparation of this manuscript.

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