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Keywords: youth, adolescent development, peer effects, family effects, delinquency prevention, resilience, decision making
Abstract
There is scant evidence regarding the relationship between cognitive variables and social factors influencing the success of community-based programs intended to foster positive youth development. This preliminary study examines the relationship among individual, community/contextual, and parenting factors, all of which have been associated with positive outcomes, and decision making in two groups of underprivileged youth. Participants for this preliminary study were drawn from two locations: the Juvenile Justice Diversion program (JJ) in Harris County, Texas, and Youth Advocates (YA), a community-based, peer-to-peer youth-mentoring organization. Participants were at-risk youth between the ages of 13 and 19 who were living in their communities. These youth were evaluated using the Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM-28), a questionnaire that indexes developmental assets associated with resilience, and the Columbia Card Task (CCT), a task that measures affective and deliberative decision making. We found group differences in the relation between decision-making skills and developmental assets. For those in the YA group, higher scores on the CYRM-28 were related to superior decision making; for youth in the JJ group, lower scores on the CYRM-28 were related to better decision making. Our results seem to indicate differences in the psychosocial environments of the two groups, such as the greater influence of anti-social peers among youth in the JJ group. These findings provide a potential direction for future research and may have implications for evaluating the effectiveness of adolescent intervention programs.
Introduction
Not all children exposed to significant environmental or social stress have negative outcomes. In fact, many children growing up under circumstances of poverty and trauma mature to become healthy, stable, and productive individuals (Masten, 2001 ). Resilience refers to the concept that some individuals have positive outcomes despite significant adversity. Research demonstrates that various psychosocial factors (e.g., the presence of at least one positive, stable adult influence in a child's life) are crucial for promoting resilience (Hawkins, Graham, Williams, & Zahn, 2009).
A major gap in the research literature is the paucity of investigations examining how individuals' cognitive skills contribute to positive outcomes, which could inform the development of intervention programs (Greenberg, 2006). In addition, research linking resilience factors to intervention strategies is significantly lacking...