Positive youth development in the United States: Research findings on evaluations of positive youth development programs.

TLDR

The article summarizes a longer piece that grew from a Department of Health and Human Services project and explains why policymakers, practitioners, and scientists advocated a shift in how youth issues are addressed in the United States. The Positive Youth Development Evaluation project aimed to define how youth development programs are described in the literature and to identify strong evaluations of these programs. The project used a structured search to locate and summarize the outcomes of these evaluations. The article summarizes evidence that positive youth development programs effectively improve youth outcomes.

Abstract

This article summarizes a much lengthier one that appeared in Prevention and Treatment. The earlier article grew out of a project initiated by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. The Positive Youth Development Evaluation project described why policy makers, practitioners, and prevention scientists advocated a shift in approach for how youth issues are addressed in this country. The Positive Youth Development Evaluation project sought to define how youth development programs have been defined in the literature and then to locate, through a structured search, strong evaluations of these programs and summarize the outcomes of these evaluations. In the current article, we explain why prevention has shifted from a single problem focus to a focus on factors that affect both positive and problem youth development, describe what is meant by positive youth development, and summarize what we know about the effectiveness of positive youth develop...