Elsevier

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

Volume 30, Issue 5, September–October 2009, Pages 601-614
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

The role of neighborhood ecological assets and activity involvement in youth developmental outcomes: Differential impacts of asset poor and asset rich neighborhoods

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2009.07.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Developmental system theories recognize that variables from multiple levels of organization within the bioecology of human development contribute to adolescent development, including individual factors, family factors and the neighborhood which includes extracurricular activities. Extracurricular activities provide a context for youth development, and participation has been linked with positive developmental outcomes. This study uses data from a subsample of early adolescents in the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development to determine whether neighborhood assets moderate the effect of adolescent activity involvement on positive and negative developmental outcomes. The relationship between activity involvement and neighborhood assets was different for girls as compared to boys when assessing outcomes of positive youth development, risk behavior, and depression. Consistent with a developmental systems perspective, the findings affirm the need for researchers and practitioners to consider multiple contextual influences when seeking to understand or promote, respectively, positive youth development.

Section snippets

Extracurricular activities as a context for development

Regardless of the specific location (i.e., at school, in the community, etc.), programs that promote positive youth development provide youth with (a) physical and psychological safety, (b) appropriate structure, (c) supportive relationships, (d) opportunities to belong, (e) positive social norms, (f) support for efficacy and mattering, (g) opportunity for skill building, and (h) integration of family, school, and community efforts (Eccles & Gootman, 2002). Alternatively, time spent in

Neighborhoods as an ecological asset

Neighborhood effects typically operate through processes that occur at the individual, family, and community levels (Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn, 2000, Leventhal et al., 2009). Particularly for younger adolescents, access to neighborhood resources and extracurricular activities may be brokered by parents (Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2000) or by adolescents' own ability to self-regulate (Gestsdottir and Lerner, 2007, Zimmerman et al., 2007). One of the principles of youth development proposed by

Defining and explaining neighborhood ecological assets

Measuring and observing neighborhood effects are a challenging, and yet important, endeavor. The most common approaches are subjective measures based on residents' perceptions of their neighborhoods and objective measures of neighborhood resources. Subjective measures have the problem that individual perceptions may not reflect the actual available resources. In turn, objective measures may fail to capture the degree to which any given resource is actually valued or utilized. Despite these

The bioecological theory of development

Developmental systems theories, and particularly bioecological theory, help to explain the complex interactions between person, process, context, and time (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), and may be particularly salient as a frame for understanding links between neighborhood assets and youth development. At the core of bioecological theory are proximal processes which are defined as “progressively more complex reciprocal interaction between an active, evolving biopsychological human organism

The current study

The data for this research are derived from the first wave (school year 2002–2003) and the third wave (school year 2004–2005) of the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development (Lerner et al., 2005), when the participants were in fifth and seventh grade, respectively. This study utilizes data from a subsample of the larger national sample that was selected due to the availability of neighborhood ecological asset measures collected by Theokas and Lerner (2006). This subsample was selected to include

Method

A subsample of youth (N = 626), including 322 girls and 304 boys, from six school districts (N = 17 schools), across four communities (Mesa, Arizona; Worcester, Massachusetts; Dade County, Florida; and Missoula, Montana), were selected from the larger sample of youth in the national 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development. As previously noted, this subsample was selected based on the work of Theokas and Lerner (2006). The youth participants were a diverse group of fifth-grade students at the

Results

Analyses of the data from Waves 1 and 3–that is, Grades 5 and 7 of the 4-H Study data set–were done to determine whether extracurricular activity involvement differentially affects youth depending upon the resources available to them in the neighborhood in which they are embedded.

Discussion

Consistent with a developmental systems perspective, the findings from this study affirmed the need to consider multiple contextual influences on development, including the impact that distal factors, such as the neighborhood, can have on the individual. A key hypothesis of the positive youth development perspective (Lerner, 2009) is that activities are developmental assets and, as such, provide an important source of youth development. Activities act as resources for positive development by

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    This article is based on a dissertation submitted by Jennifer Brown Urban to Cornell University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. The research was supported in part by a grant from the National 4-H Council to Richard M. Lerner. The authors thank Stephen Hamilton, William Trochim, Ray Swisher, and Erin Phelps for their invaluable contributions to the research reported in this article.

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