Andrea Vest Ettekal

Designing Culturally Responsive Organized After-School Activities

Organized after-school activities promote positive youth development across a range of outcomes. To be most effective, organized activities need to meet high-quality standards. The eight features of quality developed by the National Research Council’s Committee on Community-Level Programs for Youth have helped guide the field in this regard. However, these standards have largely been defined in terms of universal developmental needs, and do not adequately speak to the growing ethnic and racial diversity within the United States, which is further complicated by issues of power and social class differences. Given U.S. population shifts and after-school funding priorities, the time has come to consider new ways to provide organized after-school activities that are responsive to youth’s culture and everyday lives. The goal of this article is to explore how we can help ensure that after-school activities are culturally responsive and address the specific needs of the youth who participate in these activities. Based on theory and empirical evidence, we provide proposed practices of cultural responsiveness for each of the eight features of quality for program structure and staff. The article concludes with future directions for research and strategies to implement culturally responsive practices and harness resources.

“They Will Post a Law About Playing Soccer” and Other Ethnic/Racial Microaggressions in Organized Activities Experienced by Mexican-Origin Families

Organized activities have been found to provide positive experiences for Latino adolescents to develop confidence and learn critical life skills; however, these programs are sometimes a context where youth encounter negative experiences related to ethnic/racial microaggressions (ERMs). This qualitative study explores the types of ERMs that Mexican-origin parents and adolescents encountered in their organized activities experience. Parents were mainly concerned about SB-1070 and the associated law enforcement practices that posed a threat to transporting their children to and from the organized activity site. Adolescents reported that they encountered overt (e.g., ethnic teasing) as well as covert forms of discriminatory behavior (e.g., implicit ethnic stereotypes) from peers and adult leaders. Attention to the processes of ERM is critical to helping practitioners promote positive intergroup relations so that more Latinos will participate and stay active in organized activities.

Adolescent Athletes’ Perceptions of the Peer-Motivational Climate in Sport: Do They Matter for Empathic Concern?

Sports may be contexts supporting character virtues development, including empathic concern. However, the competitiveness of sport may also hinder adolescents’ ability for empathic concern. This study investigated how perceptions of the peer motivational climate were associated with athletes’ empathic concern. Data were drawn from a larger study of high school adolescents’ character development through sport (N = 665; 49.1% female). Task-oriented (i.e., skill-focused), but not ego-oriented (i.e., competition-focused), aspects of the peer motivational climate were associated with empathic concern. Task-oriented environments may afford youth opportunities to demonstrate empathic concern as features of task orientation include supporting and caring for teammates.

Peer motivational climate and character development: Testing a practitioner-developed youth sport model

Youth sport is a key developmental context for many reasons, including the opportunities it provides for building relationships with peers and its potential to support character development. Peers can influence adolescent sport experiences and shape their motivations, and different peer motivational climates may differentially support athlete character. Established models identify different dimensions of peer motivational climate, yet these models do not describe how aspects of peer climate may align with character. We therefore assess profiles of peer motivational climate in relation to a multi-dimensional practitioner-developed theoretical model for character development through sport. Participants were 655 adolescent athletes from the greater Boston area, in the United States. Athletes perceiving a mastery-involved peer climate, even with high intra-team competition, were most likely to exhibit positive character attributes at the three levels of character assessed: themselves, their teammates, and the game. This study also demonstrates the utility of practitioner-developed models for adolescent research.

Obesity and social marginalization: When do organized activities promote or hinder peer relationships?

ABSTRACT Overweight youth are often socially marginalized and have fewer friends than their nonoverweight peers. Participation in organized activities may be one way to promote friendships for overweight youth. In this study, we used a large nationally representative sample to test whether two aspects of participation promoted friendships, namely the number of activities and the social acceptance of activity co-participants. In contradiction to our hypotheses, participating in activities with high socially accepted peers was associated with significantly fewer friendships over time for overweight adolescents. Conversely, there were small differences between overweight and nonoverweight adolescents’ friendships when they participated in activities with low socially accepted co-participants. Our findings provide new insight that activities may not be universally beneficial for overweight adolescents’ peer relationships. We discuss the various peer mechanisms that explain why certain types of activities predict these friendship patterns for overweight youth.

When The Stars Align: On the Contributions of Gilbert Gottlieb and Peter C. M. Molenaar to Developmental Science Theory and Method1

Among the many conceptual and methodological issues of basic importance in developmental science, the nature-nurture controversy and the measurement of intraindividual change, respectively, are arguably the two most fundamental. The former issue pertains to the ontology of development: Of what is development constituted or composed? The latter issue pertains to the epistemology of the field: Through what means (methods) can we know (or measure) that a human has changed developmentally? Peter C. M. Molenaar’s (2015) short but creative and far-reaching article rightly points to the theoretical framework of Gilbert Gottlieb (e.g., 1997, 1998), a model that, today, would be understood as an instance