Validating, Norming, and Utility of a Youth Outcomes Battery for Recreation Programs and Camps

Abstract

As the pressure for accountability and evidence-based practices grows, youth programs increasingly need to document outcome achievement, create logic models that imply causality, and demonstrate mechanisms that conceptually and empirically connect to a program's targeted outcomes. While programs need reliable and valid measures, they also need tools that can be customized, administered in the field, and tabulated and used to inform decisions in a timely manner. The Youth Outcomes Battery (YOB) seeks to fill this void by offering a recreation and camp program friendly tool that includes 11 subscales relevant to positive youth development. This study generally supports the construct, discriminant, and convergent validity of the YOB through an analysis of data from 3,750 youth representing 37 summer camps.