Elsevier

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

Volume 31, Issue 6, November–December 2010, Pages 413-421
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

Differences in developmental experiences for commonly used categories of organized youth activities

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2010.07.001Get rights and content

Abstract

The coherence of adolescents' self-reported learning experiences between subgroups of organized youth activities within five commonly used categories was evaluated. Data for the present study come from a representative sample of eleventh grade adolescents' reports on learning experiences in an organized youth activity using the Youth Experience Survey (YES, 2.0). Overall, the findings indicated that within some categories of organized youth activities the subgroups were fairly homogeneous in their rates of learning experiences whereas in others the subgroups demonstrated greater differences than similarities. The implications for grouping activities into commonly used categories are discussed.

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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