Community Programs to Promote Youth Development (2002) / Chapter Skim
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8 Data and Technical Assistance Resources
8 Data and Technical Assistance Resources
Pages 228-264
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From page 228... ...
As a result, there are now data and related technical assistance resources to support youth development work. This work, however, has also produced a keen awareness among practitioners of the limitations of these resources and the need to increase their quality, breadth, and availability in the coming decade (MacDonald and Valdivieso, 2000~.
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From page 229... ...
an expanded role for national intermediaries to support these goals. USES OF SOCIAL INDICATOR DATA The uses of social indicator data for community programs for youth and youth initiatives include needs assessment, service targeting, goals tracking, program accountability, and reflective practice to improve program and policy effectiveness over time.
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Social indicator data are the primary source used to assess this progress. Individual programs can also use social indicator data as tools for setting and tracking progress toward their specific goals.
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Reflective Practice Community programs for youth can also use social indicator data to monitor their own success and to guide program refinement (i.e., they can use social indicator data as part of reflective practice)
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In this section we review the data resources available to communities through the lens of the youth development framework developed in this report. This framework identified four outcome domains of development described as personal and social assets in Chapter 3 and eight social setting domains described as features of positive developmental settings in Chapter 4.
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This is particularly important for community programs for youth, many of which serve limited geographic areas within the larger community. Neighborhood-leve!
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In the youth outcome domains, administrative data are quite strong in the areas of cognitive development, negative outcomes or behaviors, and physical health. They are weak sources of indicator data in the areas of psychological, emotional, and social development.
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A psychometric analysis of these scales revealed Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranging from to .31 to .82, with about two-thirds of the scales exceeding the .60 level, a common cutoff point used in research. The validity of the assets is primarily face validity based on their relationship in the research literature to the promotion of healthy behavior, the prevention of risk behaviors, or both.
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The survey is particularly strong in social development measures, including participation in sports, clubs, music, art, and theater activities both in and out of school; volunteering in the community; capacity for empathy and sensitivity; friendship skills; and respect for cultural diversity. Physical health measures include participation in sports activities, whether the student "takes care of their body," sexual activity, and whether the youth has been a victim of violence.
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From page 242... ...
However, a closer look reveals that the instrument is considerably more focused on negative outcomes than the PSL-AB. While the negative outcomes and behaviors domain is richly detailed, measures in the other outcome domains are a bit thin and tend to be defined in relation to risk behaviors.
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From page 243... ...
The indicators of social settings are considerably more well rounded and positive, although even here measures in the social norms domain focus totally on risk behaviors on the part of friends and family, and attitudes about risk behaviors. The survey contains multiple positive measures for structure, supportive relationships, support for efficacy and mattering, and opportunities for skill building.
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From page 244... ...
These instruments focus on individual constructs and commonly go into more depth on a topic than the more general surveys. They are most useful to community programs for youth trying to affect a particular outcome, like youth conflict resolution skills or teen pregnancy.
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As part of this project, the Youth National Outcome Work Group identified multiple available instruments for the following outcome areas: · Risk behaviors: risk-taking, substance abuse, sexual activity, academic risk, delinquency, and violence. · Social competencies: social competence, relationships, conflict resolution, decision making, social responsibility, communication, goal setting, problem solving, social and environmental navigation, and valuing diversity.
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From page 246... ...
Tables 8-2 and 8-3 list the measures and constructs, organized according to the domains in our youth development framework, for the following major national youth surveys:7 · National Education Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NELS) · National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health)
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From page 247... ...
Gaining Access to Data In order for community youth development efforts to take advantage of social indicators, they need ready access to the data. For many years, it was common for administrative data collected by one agency to stay within that agency, even though other government agencies and local private organizations could greatly benefit by using it.
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In 2000 the PSL-AB, for example, could be fielded for between $1.65 and $2.00 per youth, with additional charges of several hundred dollars each for the production of reports (Search Institute, 20001. For individual community programs for youth seeking to use social indicator data to monitor the activities and the success of their own program, the items in these surveys may be too general.
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From page 253... ...
Findings from these analyses can stimulate communication about program goals, progress, obstacles, and results among program managers, staff, participants, funders, and others. The "developmental quality" of a youth program may be defined as the extent to which it provides a social setting and a set of activities that should facilitate positive youth development.
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, in conjunction with other partners in the youth development community, exemplifies recent progress in developing indicators of developmental quality for any youth activity, regardless of its specific goals. Building on Gambone and Arbreton (1997)
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Even if a program scores high on factors that promote developmental quality, it needs to know whether each participating youth experiences meaningful involvement with its positive development environment. Thus, programs also need indicators of participation over time by individual youth to measure the "dosage" of developmental factors.
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in terms of their developmental quality, whereas CNYD aims at assessing how well the overall organization fosters positive youth development via specific activities as well as its general organizational environment. Both have value.
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Like experimental evaluation methods, quantitative data are often viewed as more objective, easier to understand, and more highly valued by funders and policy makers than qualitative data. Nonetheless, as has been suggested in the last few chapters, qualitative data can also play important roles in the design, implementation, and evaluation of community programs for youth and aid in the understanding of the process of positive youth development.
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If time permits, additional qualitative research can then elucidate the findings from the quantitative hypothesis testing and suggest yet newer hypotheses and so on through an iterative process that may yield much richer understanding than reliance on only one kind of data. Even community programs for youth that do not undergo rigorous impact evaluation can supplement small-scale quantitative assessment of program quality with data from focus groups, individual interviews, and careful observation of program operations.
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These groups are playing an increasingly important role in the education of youth program staff around youth development concepts, in organizing available data-related materials for use by such groups, and in consulting with individual programs to develop data collection and analysis strategies to support planning and reflective practice. They are providing essential information and services to the youth program community.
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There is also a section that provides youth-related statistics and collections of statistical data.9 · The Youth Development Mobilization Initiative, Center for Youth Development and Policy Research, Academy for Educational Development has a goal to ensure long-term institutional support for youth development by creating a communication network between policy makers and practitioners at the local level. It is currently developing a project, Youth Development/Community Indicators: On the Plus Side, which seeks to maximize the development of community-level social indicators using existing administrative and related data resources to support positive youth development planning and policy.
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Programs may use social indicator data for needs assessments, service targeting, goals tracking, program accountability, and in support of reflective practice to improve program and policy effectiveness over time. They also benefit from information and training to help them use these data tools wisely and effectively.
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There is evidence that youth-serving organizations have an interest in building their capacity to assess the developmental quality of their programs. To produce useful process evaluations, performance monitoring, and self-assessment, however, community programs for youth
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Data on individuals' participation across programs and in informal activities that affect developmental assets can be gathered and incorporated into basic and evaluation research. Geographic information system databases can greatly enhance the utility of social indicator data for community programs for youth by allowing users to draw on multiple data sources to pinpoint areas of need at the neighborhood level.
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264 Community Programs to Promote Youth Development vice invaluable information, support, and professional advice to state and local youth programs. Efforts to move to Internet-based systems for documenting and disseminating successful assessment tools and protocols, administering assessment instruments, inputting the responses, and analyzing the data would also simplify, streamline, and lower the costs of collecting and inputting program data and also deserve support.
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