Supplement article
Prevention science and positive youth development: competitive or cooperative frameworks?

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Abstract

Purpose

To examine the convergence in the critiques and recommendations for the future of programs to promote healthy development and prevent problem behaviors among children and adolescents

Methods

A review of literature captures two streams of thought, those promoting positive youth development approaches to youth programming and those promoting prevention science approaches to youth programming.

Results

Results suggest that advocates of positive youth development and prevention science have similar critiques of single-problem-focused prevention programs in the 1980s and early 1990s, and have similar recommendations for the future of youth programming. Further, review of data on youth development suggests that it is important to focus on risk and protection in preventing adolescent problems as well as in promoting positive youth development.

Conclusions

These results suggest that both youth development and prevention science approaches have grown from similar roots and make similar recommendations for the future of youth programming. Further, data on precursors suggest that focusing on promoting protection and reducing risk is likely to prevent problems and promote positive youth development. Yet advocates of these approaches often are at odds, suggesting that the approaches provide different paradigmatic approaches to youth programming. We conclude that cooperation between these two approaches would further progress in the field of youth programming.

Section snippets

Re-emergence of positive youth development

In the 1990s, several organizations identified and articulated the benefits of a positive youth development approach, including the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development [35], U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [36], Annie E. Casey Foundation [37], Robert Wood Johnson Foundation [38], Consortium on the School-Based Promotion of Social Competence [39], and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention [40]. Some have viewed this as a paradigm shift (after Kuhn:) [41]

Risk and protective factors across multiple domains

One concern is that the results of etiological research have not been adequately incorporated into the design of preventive interventions 14, 15. Over the past 30 years, researchers have identified longitudinal predictors that increase (often called risk factors) or decrease (often called protective factors) the likelihood of problem behaviors 14, 16, 27, 54 in neighborhoods, families, schools, and peer groups, as well as within the individual 13, 61, 62, 63. Empirically supported community

Prevention science critique of early prevention programs

Despite this broad knowledge base on risk and protective factors, most prevention programs have limited their focus to individual-level risk or protective factors and have generally addressed only one or two risk factors. Tolan and Guerra [89], in their review of violence prevention programs, found that “… most interventions tend to focus on changing one promising risk factor, and most emphasize changing only individual (and not social or environmental) characteristics.” In reviewing pregnancy

Cooperation or competition: do we need a paradigm shift?

Recently, some authors have advocated a paradigm shift in the youth development and prevention field to focus exclusively on building assets, the protective factors associated with resiliency, rather than on trying to reduce risk 108, 109. These scholars assert that targeting risk factors emphasizes the deficits of young people. They suggest that focusing on building children’s strengths will produce more positive outcomes than interventions focusing on reducing risk factors. In contrast,

Acknowledgements

Work on this article was supported by grant # RO1 DA08093 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and grant #UO1-HD30097-05S1 from the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development and the Office of Minority Programs.

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