Putting Youth on the Map: A Pilot Instrument for Assessing Youth Well-Being

Extant measures of adolescent well-being in the United States typically focus on negative indicators of youth outcomes. Indices comprised of such measures paint bleak views of youth and orient action toward the prevention of problems over the promotion of protective factors. Their tendency to focus analyses at a state or county geographic scale produces limited information about localized outcome patterns that could inform policymakers, practitioners and advocacy networks. We discuss the construction of a new geo-referenced index of youth well-being based on positive indicators of youth development. In demonstrating the index for the greater Sacramento, California region of the United States, we find that overall youth well-being falls far short of an optimal outcome, and geographic disparities in well-being appear to exist across school districts at all levels of our analysis. Despite its limitations, the sub-county geographic scale of this index provides needed data to facilitate local and regional interventions

Putting Youth on the Map: A Pilot Instrument for Assessing Youth Well-Being.

Extant measures of adolescent well-being in the United States typically focus on negative indicators of youth outcomes. Indices comprised of such measures paint bleak views of youth and orient action toward the prevention of problems over the promotion of protective factors. Their tendency to focus analyses at a state or county geographic scale produces limited information about localized outcome patterns that could inform policymakers, practitioners and advocacy networks. We discuss the construction of a new geo-referenced index of youth well-being based on positive indicators of youth development. In demonstrating the index for the greater Sacramento, California region of the United States, we find that overall youth well-being falls far short of an optimal outcome, and geographic disparities in well-being appear to exist across school districts at all levels of our analysis. Despite its limitations, the sub-county geographic scale of this index provides needed data to facilitate local and regional interventions

Beyond Good Grades: Immigrant Integration in U.S. Schools through Participation in Extracurricular Activities

Past research has typically focused on educational attainment and achievement to understand the assimilation process for immigrant youth. However, academic achievement constitutes only part of the schooling experience. In this paper, we move beyond traditional measures such as test scores and dropout, and examine patterns of school-sponsored extracurricular activity participation. Analyzing data from Add Health and drawing upon the frog-pond and segmented assimilation frameworks, we find that immigrant minority youth are disadvantaged in regards to activity participation relative to the average student in high- compared to low-SES schools. In high-SES schools, immigrant youth are less similar to their peers in terms of socioeconomic, race, and immigrant status, and as suggested by the frog-pond hypothesis, social comparison and ranking processes contribute to lower levels of social integration of immigrant youth into the school setting. We also find that as percent minority rises in high-SES schools, participation increases as well. The opposite pattern appears in low-SES schools: when percent minority increases, activity participation among immigrant minority students declines. These results are commensurate with both theoretical frameworks, and suggest that different mechanisms are at work in high- and low-SES schools. However, the effects of minority peers do not seem to hold for sports participation, and we also find that percent immigrant operates differently from percent minority, depressing the probability of activity participation across both high- and low-SES schools. The main implication of our results is that racially diverse, higher-SES schools are the most favorable contexts for the social integration of immigrant minority youth as well as third- and later-generation blacks and Hispanics

Where and With Whom Does a Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Promote Progress in College?

A promising way to mitigate inequality is by addressing students’ worries about belonging. But where and with whom is this social-belonging intervention effective? Here we report a team-science randomized controlled experiment with 26,911 students at 22 diverse institutions. Results showed that the social-belonging intervention, administered online before college (in under 30 minutes), increased the rate at which students completed the first year as full-time students, especially among students in groups that had historically progressed at lower rates. The college context also mattered: The intervention was effective only when students’ groups were afforded opportunities to belong. This study develops methods for understanding how student identities and contexts interact with interventions. It also shows that a low-cost, scalable intervention generalizes its effects to 749 4-year institutions in the United States