Elizabeth M. Dowling

Positive Youth Development: Thriving as the Basis of Personhood and Civil Society

Theoretical issues pertinent to a dynamic, developmental systems understanding of positive youth development and the thriving process in such development are discussed. Thriving involves relative plasticity in human development and adaptive regulations of person-context relations. An integrated moral and civic identity and a commitment to society beyond the limits of ones own existence enable thriving youth to be agents both in their own, healthy development and in the positive enhancement of other people and of society. Thriving youth become generative adults through the progressive enhancement of behaviors that are valued in their specific culture and that reflect the universal structural value of contributing to civil society.

Structural Relations among Spirituality, Religiosity, and Thriving in Adolescence.

Using the randomly selected subsample of 1,000 youth (472 boys, M age = 12.2 years, SD = 1.5; 528 girls, M age = 12.1 years, SD = 1.4) drawn by Dowling, Getsdottir, Anderson, von Eye, and Lerner (in press) from a Search Institute (1984) archival data set, Young Adolescents and Their Parents (YAP), this research employed structural equation modeling procedures to appraise the structural relations among second-order factors of religiosity, spirituality, and thriving. Three hierarchically related models were tested: The first model was a complete mediation model that involved a direct effect of spirituality on thriving and an indirect effect of spirituality on thriving, mediated by religiosity, the second model only consisted of the mediated effect, and the third model only consisted of the direct effects of spirituality on thriving and religiosity on thriving. Consistent with expectations, the complete mediation model provided reasonably good fit to the data and was significantly better than either of the alternative models. The importance of the findings reported here for the future study of youth thriving using either the YAP data set or new, longitudinal studies is discussed.

Thriving in Adolescence The Voices of Youth-Serving Practitioners, Parents, and Early and Late Adolescents

This study assesses if correspondence existed between concepts scholars use to discuss positive youth development (PYD) and terms used by practitioners, parents, and youth to discuss exemplary PYD, or thriving. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of 173 interviews about the meaning of thriving found no significant commonality between the terms used in the scholarly literature and the specific words or phrases used by the adult and youth participants. However, the terms generated by the adults and youthwere able to be grouped into categories that reflect the general concepts used in the PYD literature (e.g., the five Cs ofcompetence, confidence, connection, character, caring, and the sixth C, contribution). Applications to public education youth programs are discussed.

Spirituality, Religiosity, and Thriving Among Adolescents: Identification and Confirmation of Factor Structures

Using a data set from Search Institutes research archive, Young Adolescents and Their Parents (YAP), this study ascertained whether religiosity, spirituality, and thriving could be identified and confirmed as separate latent constructs among a randomly selected subsample of 1,000 youth drawn from the larger YAP sample. Factor analytic and structural equation modeling findings provided evidence of the separate, multidimensional presence of the latent constructs (second-order factors) and confirmed the presence of 4 religiosity first-order factors (e.g., role of a faith institution in ones life), 3 spirituality first-order factors (e.g., orientation to help people other than the self), and 9 thriving first-order factors (e.g., future orientation/path to a hopeful future). Limitations of this analyses and directions for future research with this, and related data sets, are discussed.

Positive Youth Development: Is There a Nomological Network of Concepts Used in the Adolescent Developmental Literature?

To gauge the status of connections between the research literature about adolescent development and current theoretical and applied work pertinent to the concept of positive youth development (PYD), we assessed whether the adolescent development literature from 1991 to 2003 reflected a network of terms associated with PYD. A list of 16 terms potentially linked to PYD was generated by integrating conceptualizations of PYD presented in key scholarly publications and found among the ideas of scholars who are expert in the PYD perspective. The presence of these terms was then assessed in a set of nine leading development journals. The analysis of more than 5,500 article titles and abstracts indicated that a nomological network of concepts pertinent to PYD has not yet emerged in the research literature. We discuss possible reasons for the disparity between this sample of publications in developmental science and the growing theoretical and applied interest in PYD.

Positive Individual and Social Behavior among Gang and Nongang African American Male Adolescents.

To explore potential bases of positive development among gang youth, attributes of positive individual and social behavior were assessed in individual interviews with 45 African American adolescent male members of inner-city Detroit gangs and 50 African American adolescent males from the same communities but involved in community-based organizations aimed at promoting positive youth development. As anticipated, the groups differed in regard to the majority of interview questions and to positive attribute scores pertaining to parents/family, peer relations, school/education, drug use, sexual activity, religious activities/religiosity, racial/ethnic identity, role models/confidants, and neighborhood/safety. The correlations of attributes scores were more often significant (i.e., coupled) for the gang than for the nongang youth. Consistent with the ideas that all young people have resources pertinent to positive development and that, therefore, gang and nongang youth would have some resource comparability, across the nine attributes, about one quarter of the gang youth had total positive attribute scores that were above the average total positive attribute score for the nongang youth. Implications of these findings for both research and applications to programs seeking to promote positive youth development among diverse youth are discussed.

Internal and External Developmental Assets Among African American Male Gang Members

The presence of individual and ecological assets for positive development was assessed through data derived from individual interviews with 45 African American adolescent male members of inner-city Detroit gangsand50 African American adolescent males living in the same communities but involved in community-based organizations (CBOs) aimed at promoting positive youth development.The CBO youth had higher levels of both domains of assets. However, all gang members possessed at least one asset, and 15.6% of the gang youth had a total mean asset score that was above the total mean asset score of the CBO youth. In turn, the asset scores for the former group were significantly more likely to be correlated than was the case for the later group. The implications of these findings are discussed in regard to the idea that all youth possess the potential for positive development and to the nature of policies and programs pertinent to enhancing the life chances of diverse youth.

Contributions of Lifespan Psychology to the Future Elaboration of Developmental Systems Theory

Developmental systems theories stress that, across the human life span, development involves the integration, or “fusion,” of changing relations among the multiple levels of organization that comprise the ecology of human life. These levels range from biology through culture and history. Indeed, the embeddedness of all levels within history provides a temporal component to human development; makes the potential for change a defining feature of human development; and as such assures that relative plasticity (i.e., the potential for systematic change across ontogeny) characterizes development across the human life span. Moreover, within this developmental system changes are interdependent. For instance, changes within one level of organization, e.g., developmental changes in personality or cognition within the individual, are reciprocally related to developmental changes within other levels, e.g., involving changes in caregiving patterns or spousal relationships within the familial level of organization. In turn, the reciprocal changes among levels of organization are both products and producers of the reciprocal changes within levels. These interrelations illustrate the need for integrated, multidisciplinary study across the life span of changes within and among the multiple levels of organization comprising the ecology of human life. The essence of such scholarship involves the conceptualization and investigation of the mutual regulation of change between person and context or, in other words, of the regulation of relations, of how structures function and how functions are structured over time. The lifespan model of this regulatory relational architecture—the model of selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC)—is thus an exemplary theoretical frame within which to study the human developmental system.