Showing papers by "Reed W. Larson published in 2017"

Anger, worry, and hurt in early adolescence: An enlarging world of negative emotions.

Abstract: Employing the "regal" access, adolescents' experiences of anger, worry, and hurt can be understood as responses to breaches of what really matters, as disjunctions between life as they expect and want it and life as it actually is. Early adolescence is a time when these internal representations are rapidly changing, fueled by cognitive development, an expanding domain of things that matter. The cognitive advances of adolescence lead to fundamental insight that other people are centers of thinking and feeling. The adolescent age period is associated with an expanding horizon, an increased awareness of a wider social, political, and economic world, and also budding interest in romantic relationships. Attribution of negative emotions to subcategories "Fights" and "Social rejection" shows little difference in frequency between age groups. Girls’ emotions are more social in preadolescence, and become more social in early adolescence. Their negative emotions are more often caused by breaches in the increasingly complex norms of expected behavior among friends and family.

How Staff of Youth Programs Respond to Culture-Related Incidents: Nonengagement Versus Going "Full-Right-In".

Abstract: Incidents in which program leaders confront issues of culture and race occur regularly in many youth programs. These incidents are important because they reflect powerful dimensions of youth’s live...

How trust grows: Teenagers’ accounts of forming trust in youth program staff.

Abstract: Trust is a critical ingredient to young people’s experience of effective learning relationships with youth program leaders. Youth’s trust typically follows trajectories that grow over time spent in a program through interactions with leaders. We interviewed 108 ethnically diverse youth (mean age: 15.7; range = 12–19 years) at 13 project-based programs (arts, leadership, technology) to obtain their accounts of experiences that increased their trust. Qualitative analyses were used to capture the specific, varied processes youth described. Findings identified 11 sequences of trust-growth, each entailing a distinct type of leader action in a specific context, leading to distinct youth evaluative processes. These fit into 3 overarching categories representing different types of youth experiences with the leader: (a) the leader provided support to youth’s work on their project, (b) the leader interacted with youth as a whole person with goals, needs and interests beyond the program, and (c) youth observed and evaluated leaders from a bird’s-eye view. Theoretical analyses across the processes led to 4 propositions about how youth’s trust grows. First, project-based programs provide rich and varied affordances for leaders to foster youth’s trust-growth. Second, trust-growth often stems from leaders’ attuned responses to situations when youth experience vulnerability. Third, trust develops when leaders’ actions align with youth’s goals and empowerment. Fourth, youth’s appraisals of trustworthiness involves discerning assessments of leaders over time; these included youth compiling evidence from multiple experiences and employing multiple criteria. The findings lead to recommendations on how trust can be cultivated in youth-staff relationships.

Introduction to Special Issue: The Importance of Culture in Youth Programs

Abstract: Many of us see youth programs as a unique and important context in adolescents’ lives. They have been described as “sanctuaries” and “safe havens” that provide teens alternate spaces—apart from the often more vulnerable domains of school, family, and neighborhood. Similarly, they have been seen as intermediate “transitional” settings between the worlds of adolescence and adulthood, settings that combine valuable components of both: a youthcentered focus and openness to youth culture with the presence of caring supportive adults who serve as bridges to adult worlds. A central element in this positive narrative is a belief—supported by increasing evidence—that effective programs can emancipate youth’s often untapped capacities for individual and collective agency and social emotional development (Durlak, Weissberg, & Pachan, 2010; Vandell, Larson, Mahoney, & Watts, 2015). At their best, programs are thought to be powerful developmental settings that support active processes of youth empowerment, self-discovery, character development, healing, sociopolitical awakening, and acquisition of valuable social capital (Eccles & Gootman, 2002; Gast, Okamoto, & Feldman, 2016; Ginwright, 2010; Larson, 2011). But is this narrative realized for all youth, especially youth of color and immigrant youth? At times, this powerful narrative is treated as though it transcends culture and race. It is assumed that a youth-centered space necessarily allows all young people to feel safe and engage in these processes. However, is it possible, for example, that a youth’s immigrant background or membership in a “minority” culture or race can create barriers to the experience of

Responsibility Development Transfers across Contexts: Reciprocal Pathways between Home and Afterschool Programs.

Abstract: We investigated adolescent responsibility across 2 developmental contexts, home and an afterschool program. Longitudinal data were collected from 355 ethnically diverse 11-20-year-old adolescents (M = 15.49; 55.9% female) in 14 project-based programs. Youth rated their responsibility in the program and at home at 4 time points; parents and leaders rated youth at Time 1. The first research objective was to evaluate 3 aspects of construct validity concerning scores of responsibility assessed through a new measure. Analyses provided evidence that program- and home-responsibility scores were distinct (i.e., evidence of the structural aspect of validity); that responsibility scores were invariant across age, gender, and ethnicity (i.e., generalizability evidence); and of external validity based on parent reports (i.e., convergent evidence). The second objective was to examine cross-context transfer of responsibility. A series of cross-lagged structural equation models (SEMs) revealed that higher responsibility in each context (home, program) predicted higher responsibility in the other context, even after controlling for the stability and within-time associations. At the last time interval, the program-to-home path was significantly stronger than the corresponding home-to-program path. The third objective was to assess whether these relations were moderated by adolescent ethnicity, gender, age, or years in the program. Multigroup SEMs revealed that pathways of influence did not differ across groups. Taken as a whole, results indicate that experiences in the 2 contexts of home and program lead to interindividual differences in the development of youth self-reported responsibility, but that affordances for responsibility development across contexts change over time. (PsycINFO Database Record