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Optimal Parenting Behaviors in Early Adolescents’ Relationships with Numerous Adults: Preliminary Survey Development and Factor Analysis
| Title: | Optimal Parenting Behaviors in Early Adolescents’ Relationships with Numerous Adults: Preliminary Survey Development and Factor Analysis |
| Author: | McLaughlin, Marc D. |
| Description: | Measuring positive youth development constructs has proven highly relevant to communities’ efforts to create and implement appropriate, effective youth development initiatives. Various entities (e.g., Search Institute) have developed survey tools for creating school-wide profiles of the development-enhancing resources operative in students’ lives. In this study of 215 mainstream middle school students and a number of early adolescents enrolled in alternative education programs, the current investigator introduced two major enhancements to asset-profile measurement techniques. First, most existing tools measure the assets provided by a relatively small number of “parent figures” in students’ lives. Therefore, the current research gauged the assets provided to each student by numerous (from 3 to 10) important adults in their home and community. Second, youth development measures typically do not gauge youths’ immediate, daily experiences of these assets. The current investigator, therefore, also developed and administered an electronic (Internet-based) utility that measures how pertinent adults in the young person’s environment provide assets on a day-to-day basis. Tapping the assets provided by multiple adult targets was procedurally feasible and provided a rich depiction of the relationships in which youth have (or do not have) development-enhancing experiences. Factor analyses conducted separately for each type of adult revealed important similarities and differences, across adult-types, in how specific assets reduce to broader asset categories. For a limited number of specific assets, the depth of a student’s experience of asset-provision—i.e. the average within-adult intensity and/or the across-adult redundancy of asset provision—appeared to be positively related to preliminary measures of salutary youth outcomes, such as academic success, positive friendships, and engagement in community service. Recruitment problems impeded substantial participation in the Internet-based daily survey, but the utility functioned very well and has promising potential to complement less-immediate reports in future studies. Implications of these findings for the fields of parenting research and positive youth development science are discussed. |
| Permanent Link: |
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1111780797
http://hdl.handle.net/2374.OX/18455 |
| Date: | 2005 |
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