Promoting Emotional and Behavioral Health in Preteens: Benchmarks of Success and Challenges Among Programs in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties

P/PV conducted a two-year study for The Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health to assess the effectiveness of the foundation's youth development grantmaking program and to offer lessons for future grantmaking endeavors. The resulting report describes benchmarks of quality programs for youth and strategies for addressing common program challenges

Making Every Day Count: Boys & Girls Clubs' Role in Promoting Positive Outcomes for Teens Executive Summary

This executive summary highlights the main findings from P/PV's three-year study of the role Boys & Girls Clubs play in the lives of the youth they serve. Drawing on several sources of data -- surveys of a low-income, ethnically diverse sample of approximately 320 youth (starting when they were seventh and eighth graders and following them into the ninth and tenth grades), Club attendance records over a 30-month period, and in-depth interviews with a sample of ninth graders -- we investigated the relationship between participation and three outcome areas identified by Boys & Girls Clubs of America as central to its mission: good character and citizenship, academic success and healthy lifestyles

Making Every Day Count: Boys & Girls Clubs' Role in Promoting Positive Outcomes for Teens

The third in a series of reports from P/PV's three-year study of the role Boys & Girls Clubs play in the lives of the youth they serve, Making Every Day Count examines how Club participation is related to youth's positive and healthy development in three outcome areas identified by Boys & Girls Clubs of America as central to its mission: good character and citizenship, academic success and healthy lifestyles.The report draws on several sources of data -- surveys of a low-income, ethnically diverse sample of approximately 320 youth (starting when they were seventh and eighth graders and following them into the ninth and tenth grades), Club attendance records over a 30-month period, and in-depth interviews with a sample of ninth graders -- to investigate the relationship between participation and outcomes. The findings show that teens who had higher levels of participation in the Clubs experienced greater positive change on 15 of 31 outcomes examined, including increases in integrity (knowing right from wrong) and academic confidence, decreases in incidents of skipping school, and a lower likelihood of starting to carry a weapon or use marijuana or alcohol.Qualitative data bolster these findings, providing insights from youth and staff about the practices and strategies that support the influence of the Club, as a whole, on youth's lives. The data suggest that there is a confluence of things the Clubs are doing right to serve teens and sustain their connection to the Club as they transition from middle school to high school. Interviewed staff and the teens spoke about the overall Club environment, the safe place it provides and the role of interactions with supportive adults and peers as crucial -- and, in their view, more important than specific programming -- in helping promote teens' positive development.The findings from the evaluation offer a promising picture of the role Clubs can play in the lives of teens; they also point to valuable lessons for the larger out-of-school-time field, where there is increasing interest in the question of how to effectively engage teens -- a population that has been critically underserved in many low-income communities

Deindividuation in Social Media

Deindiviuation in social media is increasing as more social media applications, such as Yik Yak, allow you to post anonymously. The deindividuation theory suggests that people who are anonymous in a group setting tend to act more aggressively than if their identity was known. It is important to understand why people do such actions while they are anonymous versus if their identity were known. For this study, Yik Yak posts from college students who attend Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University were collected to analyze. Seven participants were then given an Excel spreadsheet to sort and categorize each Yik Yak post into Content Categories and Intent Categories. Each participant had to then choose from a subset of categories within the Content and Intent Categories. The subset of Content Categories includes: aggression, charity, academic dishonesty, crime, escapism, political activities, sexual behavior, social disruption, interpersonal spying and eaves dropping, travel, and miscellaneous. The subset of Intent Categories includes: prosocial (helps others), antisocial (hurts others), nonnormative (violating social norms without hurting or helping others), and neutral (meeting none of the other three categories). The results suggested that most of the people using Yik Yak were most likely not experiencing deindividuation. We concluded this because more than half of the posts were categorized as Miscellaneous . If the Yik Yak users were experiencing deindividuation, most of the posts should have fallen into the Aggression or another violent category

The Impact of Technology on Adolescent Identity Development

This paper explores how technology use in adolescence facilitates adult identity achievement and presents evidence that technological objects, such as smartphones have become adolescent transitional objects. Early and late adolescents were surveyed about technology use and feelings associated with technology. Among older adolescents, anxiety level was related to smart phone use, such that higher anxiety was associated with greater smart phone use. The feelings and behaviors associated with use of the preferred device are consistent with feelings and behaviors associated with use of a transitional object. In contrast, younger adolescents did not appear to use technology as a transitional object. This difference may be that older adolescents are in an active phase of transition, developmentally, with movement to a university. Understanding how technology is viewed by adolescents provides insight into how technology can be used in critical environments, such as schools and homes, to facilitate a healthy transition to adulthood

More Time For Teens: Understanding Teen Participation -- Frequency, Intensity and Duration -- In Boys & Girls Clubs

Written midway through a three-year longitudinal evaluation of the role Boys & Girls Clubs play in the lives of the youth they serve, this report explores a topic of continuing interest to program operators and funders: What does it take to involve teens in positive out-of-school-time activities? Drawing on survey data from a low-income, ethnically diverse sample of approximately 400 seventh and eighth graders, Clubs attendance data tracked over a period of 17 months, and in-depth interviews with a sample of ninth graders, More Time for Teens identifies a set of factors that appear to contribute to three specific aspects of Club participation: frequency, duration and retention. The report highlights links found between accessible, safe places that provide a variety of informal and formal activities of interest to teens and higher levels of participation. It also distills lessons for programs interested in boosting teen participation. These include establishing relationships when children are younger (these relationships often endure through the teen years), taking into account the importance teens place on friendships and working with teens to establish flexibility in attendance policies as they enter their high school years

Deindividuation in Anonymous Social Media: Does Anonymous Social Media Lead to an Increase in Non-Normative Behavior?

This research presents several aspects of anonymous social media postings using an anonymous social media application (i.e., Yik Yak) that is GPS-linked to college campuses. Anonymous social media been widely criticized for postings containing threats/harassment, vulgarity and suicidal intentions. However, little research has empirically examined the content of anonymous social media postings, and whether they contain a large quantity of negative social content. To best understand this phenomenon an analysis of the content of anonymous social media posts was conducted in accordance with Deindividuation Theory (Reicher, Spears, & Postmes, 1995). Deindividuation Theory predicts group behavior is congruent with group norms. Therefore, if a group norm is antisocial in nature, then so too will be group behavior. In other words, individuals relinquish their individual identity to a group identity, while they are a part of that group. Since the application used in this study is limited to a radial distance around specific college campuses, we predicted the anonymous social media users would identify as students, and behave closer to the norms expected of a student. Our results confirm that while deindividuation did occur among the college students, it did not exceed what is considered normal behavior for the social identity of a student

Advancing Achievement: Findings from an Independent Evaluation of a Major After-School Initiative

This report presents outcomes from Public/Private Ventures research on CORAL, an eight-year, $58 million after-school initiative of The James Irvine Foundation. Findings described in the report demonstrate the relationship between high-quality literacy programming and academic gains and underscore the potential role that quality programs may play in the ongoing drive to improve academic achievement. The report includes a 12-page executive summary