Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
Differences in developmental experiences for commonly used categories of organized youth activities
Section snippets
Organized youth activities
As a growing number of stakeholders (e.g., practitioners, educators, and policy makers) look to non-educational settings, especially organized youth activities, to support youth's development for full participation in adult life (e.g., Berliner, 2009), it is imperative to hone our understanding of the developmental potentials and limits of different types of structured out-of-school time activities; such information can lead to more informed decision-making while also suggesting areas for
Sample
The sample consisted of 1782 eleventh grade students (55.8% female) from 19 high schools in Illinois. The 19 schools were selected to represent the economic strata, geographic regions, and the ethnicities of the eleventh grade population in Illinois (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). Within each of the 19 schools, students were selected to represent the cross-section of the schools' student body. Data were collected during the 2002–2003 academic year; see Larson et al. (2006) for a full description of
Results
Table 2 summarizes the MANOVA results. As shown, there were significant differences among the subgroups of activities across the six YES scores within each of the activity categories except for one category. Results are next presented separately for each of the activity categories.
Discussion
This study evaluated the congruency of adolescents' self-reported personal and interpersonal developmental experiences between subgroups of organized activities within each of five commonly used categories. The findings indicated that some broad categories of youth activities provided a reasonable summary of youths' learning experiences and others did not. Specifically, the categories of sports and performance and fine arts were the most incongruent whereas academic clubs and organizations,
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by a grant from the W.T. Grant Foundation. We thank Michael Crawford for his thoughtful comments on a previous version.
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2017, Journal of Applied Developmental PsychologyCitation Excerpt :The social nature of team sports requires that participants focus on cooperation and compromise, in order to achieve the common goal shared by all members of the team. Several studies have indeed shown that participation in team sports, specifically, is associated with improved emotion regulation, communication and social skills (Denault & Poulin, 2016; Hansen, Skorupski, & Arrington, 2010), which have been found to be lacking in many youth with depressive symptoms (Flouri & Sarmadi, 2016; Garnefski et al., 2005; Perren & Alsaker, 2009). Dealing with losses or challenges as a group may teach youths with depressive symptoms effective strategies to regulate their negative emotions by observing how their peers succeed at this task.
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2016, Journal of Applied Developmental PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Compared to team sports, individual sports (e.g., martial arts, swimming, speed skating) did not appear to be associated with high frequencies of positive individual and social experiences. Hansen et al. (2010) also found that youths who participated in individual sports scored significantly lower than youths in team sports on all experiences examined in their study (e.g., development of identity, initiative, emotion regulation, and teamwork and social skills; interpersonal relationships). However, before drawing too strong conclusions about the amount of individual and social experiences provided by team versus individual sports, these results need to be replicated because only 37 youths (9%) were involved in individual sports in our study.