Peter C Scales

Search Institute

Social capital provides young people with a web of supportive relationships that can be leveraged in pursuit of education, career, and life goals. Organized activities, an umbrella term for extracurricular activities, after-school programs, and youth development programs, are important developmental contexts for building social capital. The purpose...

In this research, we investigate the effects of parent‐youth developmental relationships on 15 psychological and social‐emotional outcomes for 633 matched pairs of adolescents and parents (50% low‐income), including 176 who met the criteria for being high‐stress families. Family stress and childhood adversity have a significant negative impact on y...

Students’ relationships with their teachers are a form of social capital (i.e., relational social capital; RSC). Latent transition analysis (LTA) was used to investigate longitudinal patterns of RSC in a sample of 786 grades 6 (35%), 7 (35%), and 8 (30%) students (48% female, 37% Hispanic, 22% white, 68% low income), and their links to academic mot...

Social capital is one of the most valuable entry points into the workforce. Yet, large portions of America’s opportunity youth lack the relationships, connections, and resources required to prepare them for work. Programs that foster social capital are one promising avenue for enhancing the work readiness of these youth. The current study examined...

The current paper explores how students’ relationships with their teachers, parents, and friends might differentially impact their academic experience and success, by presenting and integrating the results of two related studies. In the first study, survey methods and structural equation modeling are used to describe the similar and different effec...

Student–teacher relationships have been largely explored in literature from the perspective of successful relationships, i.e., what constitutes a successful relationship and how teachers build them. However, in moments of student defiance, resistance or pushback, how do teachers react? When teachers recount such moments, is the narrative one descri...

We examined how middle‐school students’ motivation, belonging, school climate, and grade point average (GPA) are affected by students experiencing developmental relationships—those that go beyond teachers being caring (e.g., showing warmth to students) and providing challenge (e.g., high expectations) to also include teachers providing support, sha...

Student-teacher relationships that improve over time may help slow or prevent declines in student motivation. In a diverse sample of 1,274 middle and high school students from three schools, this mixed-methods study found that those who improved in developmental relationships with teachers reported greater academic motivation, and more positive per...

Over five million young people have taken surveys, based on the Developmental Assets framework, aimed at understanding the internal strengths and external supports they have in their lives. These data have been effectively used to mobilize schools and community coalitions around the world to integrate a positive youth development lens into their ap...

Harnessing the demographic dividend of the large youth population in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) has proved challenging. Young people in LMICs make up one-fourth of the working-age population but nearly half of the unemployed. The challenge is that youth often enter the labor market without requisite technical and non-technical skills....

Comments on an article by Megan M. Julian & Junlei Li (see record 2012-10324-001 ). Junlei Li and Megan Julian argued that a major and under appreciated factor in the success and failure of interventions intended to improve the lives of children and youth at risk is the degree to which those interventions promote what the authors called development...

In this article, we evaluate the appropriateness of the developmental assets model for college emerging adults and introduce the Young Adult Developmental Assets Survey (YADAS). Constructed as communication tools for adolescent resiliency, Search Institute’s developmental assets are reformulated here as 40 characteristics of university lifestyles p...

Background Assets-based approaches are well-suited to youth living in majority world contexts, such as East Africa. However, positive psychology research with African adolescents is rare. One hindering factor is the lack of translated measures for conducting research. Objective This study builds capacity for positive youth development research in...

The development of youth has implications across all sectors of societies, and thus, holistic approaches to promoting positive youth development that take an across-sectors perspective may be more effective and cost-efficient ways of investing in youth. The current interest in collective impact to improve outcomes for young people intersects with g...

A cross-sectional study explored the presence and power of developmental assets in a sample of youth from rural South African townships. Learners (female = 58%; Mage = 17.1; N = 505) attending three township high schools completed self-report measures of developmental assets and thriving outcomes. Participants reported contextual assets (e.g., fami...

One of the most powerful ways to boost the payoff from school sports lays in helping coaches build developmental relationships with student-athletes. Developmental relationships are close connections through which young people develop character skills to discover who they are, gain the ability to shape their own lives, and learn how to interact wit...

There is a need for research on adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) to further clarify the broader developmental context of very young adolescents who are generally neglected in SRH research in developing countries. Programs can then address these factors: (including quality of family, school, and peer relationships, commitment to learn...

In this article, we draw on the theoretical and empirical literature to name what appear to be core dimensions of successful young adult development. We also describe some possible indicators and measures of those dimensions and sketch the kinds of developmental relationships and opportunities young people need in adolescence to effectively transit...

In the midst of growing national interest in strengthening children’s “soft” or social-emotional skills as critical for learning, work, and life, this study of 1,085 parenting adults of 3 to 13 year olds from across the United States highlights the power of family relationships as a critical, but often neglected, factor in the development of charac...

The 13-item Emergency Developmental Assets Profile measures the well-being of children and youth in emergency settings such as refugee camps and armed conflict zones, assessing whether young people are experiencing adequate positive relationships and opportunities, and developing positive values, skills, and self-perceptions, despite being in crisi...

In this study, we examined the characteristics of adolescents' deep interests or "sparks," the role of relationships in supporting the development of sparks, and whether having a spark was associated with positive developmental outcomes. Participants included 1,860 15 years olds from across the United States who participated in the national Teen Vo...

This chapter explores the intersection of spirituality and positive youth development outcomes to shed a new perspective on our understanding of youth well-being. The lion’s share of the literature on the spiritual development of young people has been based on Western, mostly Christian samples. Although a small but significant linkage has been docu...

Studies have shown that communities have not always been able to implement evidence-based prevention programs with quality and achieve outcomes demonstrated by prevention science. Implementation support interventions are needed to bridge this gap between science and practice. The purpose of this article is to present two-year outcomes from an evalu...

There continues to be a gap in prevention outcomes achieved in research trials versus those achieved in "real-world" practice. This article reports interim findings from a randomized controlled trial evaluating Assets-Getting To Outcomes (AGTO), a two-year intervention designed to build prevention practitioners' capacity to implement positive youth...

This study investigates the role of mentoring relationships in explaining associations between youth experiences of community developmental assets (i.e., involvement in structured activities and community attitudes towards youth) and youth outcomes within a national sample of 15-year-olds (n = 1,860). Results indicated that community assets were as...

Save the Children International Kishoree Kontha ("Adolescent Girls' Voices") was implemented in Bangladeshi villages to build the developmental assets (e.g., support from others, social competencies) of rural girls through peer education in social skills, literacy, and school learning. The Developmental Assets Profile (DAP) measured the project's i...

Postmaterial spiritual psychology posits that consciousness can contribute to the unfolding of material events and that the human brain can detect broad, non-material communications. In this regard, this emerging field of postmaterial psychology marks a stark departure from psychology's traditional quantum measurements and tenets. The Oxford Handbo...

This article describes a new conceptual approach to youth spiritual development, positing it as a universal aspect of positive youth development, and presents initial empirical evidence for the cross-cultural validity of this theory. Based on an international survey with 6725 youth in eight countries, it provides a global portrait of the spiritual...

Presents an obituary for Peter Lorimer Benson. When Peter Lorimer Benson died suddenly on October 2, 2011, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the youth of the world lost one of their great champions. Peter's transcendent contribution was giving people a vocabulary for talking about what youth need. It was scientific but sensible to adults and youth alike....

Community practitioners can face difficulty in achieving outcomes demonstrated by prevention science. Building a community practitioner's prevention capacity-the knowledge and skills needed to conduct critical prevention practices-could improve the quality of prevention and its outcomes. The purpose of this article is to: (1) describe how an interv...

The role of community in child and adolescent development is emerging as a significant area of theoretical inquiry, research, and application. This article describes the development and utilization of a comprehensive community change effort designed to increase the attention of all community members toward strengthening core developmental processes...

The framework of developmental assets posits a theoretically-based and research-grounded set of opportunities, experiences, and supports that are related to promoting school success, reducing risk behaviors, and increasing socially-valued outcomes including prosocial behavior, leadership, and resilience. A considerable body of literature on develop...

The Developmental Assets Profile (DAP) measures young people’s reported experience of eight categories of developmental assets known to be linked to numerous indicators of well-being, including Support, Empowerment, Boundaries and Expectations, Constructive Use of Time, Commitment to Learning, Positive Values, Social Competencies, and Positive Iden...

Although most social science research on adolescence emphasizes risks and challenges, an emergent field of study focuses on adolescent thriving. The current study extends this line of inquiry by examining the additive power of identifying and nurturing young people's "sparks," giving them "voice," and providing the relationships and opportunities t...

Examining how spirit develops as part of identity development can deepen our understanding of how meaning, purpose, connectedness, and authentic living contribute to human thriving – and what happens when they go awry. However, research in this field has been limited by a conflation of “religion” and “spirituality” both theoretically and empiricall...

We describe ‘thriving’ as an under-utilized construct that can add value to theory, research, and application in adolescent development. We draw on developmental systems theories to suggest that thriving represents the dynamic and bi-directional interplay of a young person intrinsically animated and energized by discovering his/her specialness, and...

Both individual and ecological influences are implicated as factors linked to youth violence. In this paper, we conduct analyses on several databases of 6th-12th grade students in the United States, to explore the linkage of positive relationships, opportunities, skills, and values, called Developmental Assets, to prevention of youth aggressive and...

Building on a developmental framework positing five types of assets or inputs needed for children's development, referred to as promises, we investigated the extent to which American children and youth experience the five Promises articulated by the America's Promise Alliance. These are: (1) Caring Adults, (2) Safe Places and Constructive Use of Ti...

The links between prosocial action and health in adolescence have not been a central area of inquiry in the social sciences. Nevertheless, there is a growing body of literature that provides some hint about this intersection. This is partly due to the relatively recent national interest in volunteerism and the forms of it mandated or encouraged by...

This chapter describes positive youth development (PYD) as an emerging arena of applied developmental science. We show how PYD is both rooted in the theoretical traditions of developmental psychology, and fueled by newer emphases on nurturing the potentialities of youth more than addressing their supposed deficits, and on addressing and helping to...

A sample of 370 students in the 7th-9th grades in 1998 was followed for 3 years through the 10th-12th grades in order to investigate the relation of "developmental assets"--positive relationships, opportunities, skills, values, and self-perceptions--to academic achievement over time, using actual GPA as the key outcome variable. The greater the num...

The contribution of nonfamily adults to young people's well-being was explored using both a cross-sectional national sample of 614 12- to 17-yearolds and a longitudinal sample of 370 students followed from 6th–8th grades through 10th–12th grades. Both variable- and person-centered analyses were employed. Young people's involvement in volunteering,...

Three large and diverse data sets were used to study the relations among 6th?12th grade students' community service and service-learning experiences, academic success, and socioeconomic status (SES). Principals in high-poverty, urban, and majority nonwhite schools were more likely to judge service-learning's impact on student attendance, engagement...

This study reaffirms the potential and power of service-learning as a strategy for simultaneously engaging young people in civic and community life, promoting their healthy development, and strengthening their education. It reveals a core of school leaders who believe strongly in the importance and power of service-learning--even in the face of pre...

Alexander von Eye Michigan State Using two randomly selected separate subsamples of 50,000 middle or high school stu-dents drawn from the 1999 to 2000 Search Institute Profiles of Student Life Attitudes and Behavior survey, first-and second-order factors of items assessing internal and external assets were identified. In both samples, first-order e...

This article reports the connections among urban students’ school-business partnership experiences, developmental assets or strengths they report in their lives, and positive developmental outcomes. Surveys were completed by 429 9th-to 12th-grade Hispanic and African American students, mostly low income in an inner-city high school, and 76 students...

This study assesses if correspondence existed between concepts scholars use to discuss positive youth development (PYD) and terms used by practitioners, parents, and youth to discuss exemplary PYD, or thriving. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of 173 interviews about the meaning of thriving found no significant commonality between the terms us...

Advances in our understanding of adaptation are rooted in the seminal work of Garmezy, Rutter, Werner, and others who “discovered” a not inconsiderable proportion of children who, thought to be at risk for current and future maladaptation, showed few or no signs of pathology and often exhibited high levels of competence (Garmezy, 1974; Rutter, 1979...

The adolescent does not find challenge or help from the church in the turmoil of growing up, but a more radical secular view of Christianity might be effective

Search Institute has identified 40 Developmental Assets™ that are building blocks of healthy development and success for children and adolescents. Young people's experience of most of these developmental assets declines over the middle school years. In this article, research is described showing the prevalence and impact of developmental assets amo...

Unrelated adults play potentially important roles in the positive socialization of children and youth, but studies of adolescents suggest the majority of adults do not engage positively with young people on an intentional, frequent, and deep basis. As a result, only a minority of young people report experiencing key developmental assets that have b...

The authors report on a telephone poll with a nationally representative sample of 1,425 U.S. adults in which they investigated how parental status and age of child might affect patterns of adult engagement with children and youth outside their own families. Compared to nonparents, parents considered 12 of 20 ways of being involved with young people...

To investigate the relation of student exposure to selected developmental assets with indicators of thriving, using more reliable measures than previously reported. Self-report surveys were completed by a diverse sample of 5136 students in 6th-12th grades. Analyses of variance were used to examine the assets-thriving relation. A majority of student...

Our study suggests that there is indeed a core group of at least two social norms (encouraging kids to take school seriously and expecting them to respect adults as authority figures) and seven social values that represent a beginning basis for clarifying adults’ reasonable responsibility to nurture and guide young people. Doubtless there are other...

An increasing body of research points both to the important role that community influences, apart from demographic factors, play in the healthy development of young people, and also to ″features of the cultural context that signal rupture in key community dynamics″ (Benson et al., 1998, p. 140). The apartness of children and especially of youth fro...

As summarized by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine (2000), a 3vast store″ of research has shown that parents are ″the most influential adults″ in children’s lives, even when children spend most of their waking hours in child care. The key feature of ″parenting″ is not necessarily who provides that nurture and guidance, but...

Multiple and contradictory cultural norms and assumptions about the young and about adults’ relationships with young people build a perceptual bias and create a frame of reference within which adults make decisions about personal and collective actions to benefit young people. We have alluded to adults’ various fears of negative consequences for g...

Most young people are not bereft of positive interactions with their parents and other adults in the extended family, or with adults such as teachers, after-school program leaders, and youth workers in religious congregations. Obviously, all these adults, to varying degrees, can and do play positive roles in young people’s development, and playing...

A recent telephone survey of 1,425 adults and 614 youth aged 12 to 17 is part of an ongoing effort to better understand adult engagement with young people and the impact of these relationships on the development of children and youth. The survey reveals agreement about some fundamental principles for relationships between unrelated youth and adults...

Unrelated adults play potentially important roles in the positive socialization of children and youth, but studies of adolescents suggest the majority of adults do not engage positively with young people on an intentional, frequent, and deep basis. As a result, only a minority of young people report experiencing key developmental assets that have b...

Both a sense of belonging and a belief in their own competency seem to be missing from the school experiences of disengaged, underachieving students. Building students’ developmental assets is a promising practice for reconnecting students and supporting achievement. Looking at schools through an assets lens can promote concrete changes in school o...

The effects of service-learning on social responsibility and academic success were investigated among a large, racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of students in Grades 6 through 8 in three middle schools. Over the school year, service-learning students maintained their concern for others’ social welfare, whereas control students declined...

This article investigated the contribution of developmental assets to the prediction of thriving behaviors among adolescents. The study was based on a sample of 6,000 youth in Grades 6-12 evenly distributed across 6 ethnic groups. Investigated were the effects of gender, grade, and levels of youth assets on 7 thriving indicators: school success, le...

Developmental assets provide the positive building blocks young people need for success. In this article, based on a keynote address to attendees at the 1998 American School Health Association annual conference, research is discussed that suggests building specific developmental assets relates to lowered risk behavior patterns and increased pattern...

Developmental assets provide the positive building blocks young people need for success. In this article, based on a keynote address to attendees at the 1998 American School Health Association annual conference, research is discussed that suggests building specific developmental assets relates to lowered risk behavior patterns and increased pattern...

In this book, Scales and Leffert review more than 800 scientific articles and reports that relate to Search Institute's conceptual framework of developmental assets—positive relationships, opportunities, skills, values, and self-perceptions that all young people need to be healthy, caring, and productive. Each chapter shows (1) how the scientific l...

This report presents both a framework for understanding positive factors that contribute to the healthy development of young people, termed "developmental assets," and a portrait of 6th-to-12th-grade youth based on that framework. The report analyzes and interprets data from 99,462 youth in 213 communities collected during the 1996-97 school year....

Discusses findings of a study of service-learning programs in middle schools in Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Missouri, particularly noting reasons the programs could be improved to show a greater impact on students. Considers the effects of such programs on students' academic achievement and social development. (JPB)

A problem-focused paradigm tends to dominate theory, research, and practice and has been traditionally used to plan, organize, and implement prevention policies, programs, and practices. An emerging paradigm focuses on conceptualizing core elements of human development to enhance health and well-being. This article describes the research instrument...

The role of community in child and adolescent development is emerging as a significant area of theoretical inquiry, research, and application. This article describes the development and utilization of a comprehensive community change effort designed to increase the attention of all community members toward strengthening core developmental processes...

A survey of 659 family support workers' regarding training and their provision of services for families with 10- to 15-year-olds showed that 30% to 50% rated their previous training as inadequate or poor, had inaccurate knowledge about young adolescent development, and felt they were doing an inadequate or poor job promoting developmental assets fo...

The presence of caring adults in the extended family and unrelated adults, such as neighbors, teachers, youth workers, and clergy, is thought to make a positive contribution to young adolescent development. Many reports mention the importance of those relationships, but there is a sparse empirical literature describing their nature and role in youn...

Many young adolescents, possibly as many as half, feel boxed in and bored in their middle schools. Research suggests that schools, parents, and the rest of the community must do more to make middle schools places where young adolescents thrive. In spite of the emergence of the junior high school and later the middle school in the 20th century, gaps...

Middle grades teachers and academic deans were surveyed about professional preparation programs, what improvements were needed, and how preservice programs and certification requirements were responding. Half of the teachers and most of the deans believed the programs prepared people adequately. Teachers wanted more preparation on adolescent develo...

Research indicates that middle schools are very successful at meeting the needs and developmental characteristics of young adolescents. Middle schools use a team approach, providing stability and continuity as teachers integrate subject areas into broader themes and units. Parental involvement is encouraged at the middle school level. (SM)

Middle schools must place high academic emphasis on health education and critical thinking skills which are developmentally important for young adolescents. Reasons why young adolescents should apply critical thinking to health issues include enhancing cognitive development, making health risk decisions, and preparing to be informed citizens. (SM)

To promote academic success for young adolescents, schools must meet the following developmental needs: (1) positive social interaction with adults and peers; (2) structure and clear limits; (3) competency and achievement; (4) creative expression; (5) physical activity; (6) meaningful participation in their families, schools, and communities; and (...