Developmental Psychology Commons^™

Maximizing Youth Leadership In Out-Of-School Time Programs: Six Best Practices From Youth Driven Spaces, Jamie Heng-Chieh Wu, Alison Shereda, Sara T. Stacy, John Kenneth Weiss, Megan Heintschel

Journal of Youth Development

This paper aims to provide strategies for youth-serving organizations to maximize opportunities for youth to develop leadership skills within the out-of-school time program context. The sample includes 5 youth-serving agencies who participated in the Youth Driven Spaces initiative led by a Midwest program. Data for this project included observations of youth–adult meetings, field notes from youths’ reflections on key model activities, and interviews with adult staff to identify common challenges and supportive solutions. We identified 6 emergent themes for supporting youth leadership: (a) engage youth in meetings, (b) create opportunities for youth to learn how to be leaders, (c) recognize …

Civic Engagement And Advocacy In Rural Wisconsin: Youth Development Through Legislative Forums, Doug Liphart, Neil James Klemme, Ian Meeker

Journal of Youth Development

Youth Development programming that engages youth to work side by side with local leaders creates an environment where youth develop civic skills. These skills include a greater understanding of the legislative process, their role in our democracy, and increased engagement in the democratic process. Through their participation in the Superior Days Legislative Forum, youth increase their civic skills, are inspired to create change in their communities, ask questions and respond to challenges by bringing legislative issues of concern unique to their community to the entire representative body at the state capitol. Youth delegates also gain experience partnering with adults from …

An Enhanced Mentoring Model’S Impact On Youth In Boys And Girls Clubs, Lisa Mcgarrie, Eric Napierala, Carrie Oliver, Emily Heberlein, Brittany Taylor, Angie Snyder

Journal of Youth Development

Although federal funding has been provided to add mentoring to youth development programs for decades, we still lack knowledge about the impacts of mentoring on youth outcomes. This research seeks to fill a gap by documenting youth outcomes from an enhanced mentoring approach for urban Boys and Girls Clubs (BGC) in the Southeastern United States delivered by paid staff who serve as mentors through group activities and 1:1 interactions with youth. We perform logistic regressions of secondary data from a cohort of BGCs to understand the relationships between enhanced mentoring and youth outcomes related to program retention, behaviors, and academics. …

Importance Of The Access, Equity, And Opportunity Competencies Among 4-H Professionals, Matt Benge, Jeff Wayne Howard

Journal of Youth Development

The 4-H Professional Research, Knowledge and Competencies (PRKC) is a professional development framework that can be used to identify competency gaps and training needs of 4-H professionals. The PRKC consists of 6 competency domains, 1 being access, equity, and opportunity (AEO). A tailored design method was used to gather data and sort the respondents between rural and urban community type. 4-H Extension agents serving urban communities perceived 12 out of the 14 AEO domain components as more important than agents serving rural communities did. The 2 AEO domain components that were not significantly different in perceived importance were values, norms, …

Book Review: Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, Laura M. Stanton, Leo M. Taylor, Jenny M. Lobb, Pat Holmes, Steve Brady, Imani Scruggs

Journal of Youth Development

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race is a 2017 revised and updated edition to Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s original book written in 1997. The book explores decades of research on the psychology of racism, with an emphasis on the psychology of racial identity in Black, White, and other ethnic and cultural identities. The author helps readers gain a better understanding of historic and modern racism and the implications it has on individuals today. The book also contains important messages for people who work with diverse groups of adults and particularly …

A Self-Assessment Approach To Understanding 4-H Professional Development Needs In The Northeast, Marycarmen Kunicki, Marissa Staffen, Jennifer Cushman, Rachel E. Lyons, Lisa Phelps, Kevin Sullivan

Journal of Youth Development

In 2017, the National 4-H professional research, knowledge, and competencies (PRKC) taxonomy was updated reflecting the current needs of 4-H youth development professionals. Knowledge and skill gaps of 4-H professionals need to be identified to optimize resource allocation for professional development on the state and regional level. We developed a web-based self-assessment of the PRKC tool using Qualtrics, that evaluated the core competencies across the 6 PRKC domains: (a) youth development; (b) youth program development; (c) volunteerism; (d) equity, access, and opportunity; (e) partnerships; and (f) organizational systems. The responses from 188 Extension 4-H professionals (approximately a quarter of the …

The Associations Between Family Socioeconomic Status, Family Expectations, And Child Academic Achievement Via Nurturant-Involved Parenting, Teacher–Student Relationship, And Academic Self-Regulation In Chinese Families, Lei Jin

Dissertations - ALL

Chinese parents place a high value on their children’s academic excellence and have high career aspirations for their children. Family socioeconomic status (FSES) and family expectations on children’s future achievement play pivotal roles in children’s academic achievement. Using data from the 2014 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and structural equation modeling techniques, the pathways of association between FSES and children’s academic achievement through family expectations on children’s future achievement, parenting strategies, teacher–student relationship, and academic self-regulation were examined. The sample included 802 families with children between 10 and 13 years (46% girls and 58.4% children from rural areas). Higher family …

Psychology Of Addiction: Discussion & Essay Questions, Brent Maximin

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Resilience Development In Children With Adverse Childhood Experiences: The Role Of The Occupational Therapist And The Interdisciplinary Team, Kayla Frederick

Student Journal of Occupational Therapy

Research has revealed adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have a negative effect on a child’s development and put a child at an increased risk of physical and mental health problems in adulthood including obesity, diabetes, depressed mood, and attempted suicide (Anda et al., 2006; Felitti et al., 1998; Gilbert et al., 2015; Putamen, 2006). Some children have been able to counteract the negative effects of ACEs and achieve positive life outcomes using a principle called resilience (Zolkoski & Bullock, 2012). While researchers have begun to identify the key skills and character traits associated with resilience in children, few have explored …

Parental Tuning Of Language Input To Autistic And Nonspectrum Children, Angela Xiaoxue He, Rhiannon Luyster, Sudha Arunachalam

Emerson Authors, Researchers, & Creators

Caregivers’ language input supports children’s language development, and it is often tuned to the child’s current level of skill. Evidence suggests that parental input is tuned to accommodate children’s expressive language levels, but accommodation to receptive language abilities is less understood. In particular, little is known about parental sensitivity to children’s abilities to process language in real time. Compared to nonspectrum children, children on the spectrum are slower to process language. In this study, we ask: Do parents of autistic children and those of nonspectrum children tune their language input to accommodate children’s different language processing abilities? Children with and …

Positive Digital Communication Among Youth: The Development And Validation Of The Digital Flourishing Scale For Adolescents, Jasmina Rosič, Sophie H. Janicke-Bowles, Luca Carbone, Bojana Lobe, Laura Vandenbosch

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Research has extensively studied the negative effects of digital communication on adolescents’ well-being. However, positive digital experiences and behavior in adolescence are still poorly understood. The recently developed Digital Flourishing Scale addresses this gap and focuses on the positive perceptions of a user’s experiences and behaviors in digital communication among adults. In this paper, we developed an adolescent version of this scale. Study 1 demonstrated the internal consistency of the scale and the same factor structure for adolescence as for adulthood: connectedness, civil participation, positive social comparison, authentic self-presentation, and self-control. Study 2 confirmed the identified factor structure with a …

Stress And The Validity Of Parent Report Measures, Katharine Fabro

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Data collected from self-report measures can be problematic as participants may misunderstand questions, misremember information, or misrepresent themselves when answering questions. Bias in self-report data is particularly concerning for parents of children with DD, as these measures are often used as part of diagnostic decisions and service allocations. Parents of children with DD typically experience higher levels of stress than parents of typically developing children. Stress has been shown to decrease cognitive functioning and bias parent perceptions, making it more likely that parents will inaccurately respond to self-report measures inquiring about their own parenting behaviors and their child’s maladaptive behaviors. …

Fathers Are Fathers Are Fathers: How Sociocultural Context And Sexual Orientation Influence The Gendering Of Children, Sarah M. Frantz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Though the body of literature on gay father-headed families indicates there is no significant differences on measures of gender normativity and well-being between children raised with two dads and their peers raised by heterosexual parents, there is a proliferation of anti-LGBTQ+ policies throughout the United States aimed at limiting this community’s rights and silencing their lived experiences. Given that sociocultural and political environments vary greatly state-to-state, it is important to see how the specific context in which fathers live may impact their differential parenting of sons and daughters, their gender beliefs, and the way they feel they would navigate gender …

Oxytocin, A Lover And A Fighter: Maternal Trauma Exposure And Mother-Child Coregulation, Patricia M. Pehme

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The placenta is responsible for regulating the fetal growth and environment in preparation for the anticipated external life. To succeed, it continuously adapts and weaves in a variety of neuroendocrine signals from the maternal organism. If a mother was exposed to trauma and her physiology sustained a change in the functioning of the immune, autonomic and/or endocrine systems, the placenta may anticipate different external environments for her children as compared to children of mothers without trauma exposure. This dissertation examined possible underlying mechanisms of psychosocial trauma transmission from one generation to the next via the placental oxytocinergic pathway. Encompassing three …

A Survey Study Of Speech-Language Therapists’ Experiences With Teletherapy At The Onset Of The Covid-19 Crisis, Jason A. Rosas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study aimed to understand how delivering pediatric treatment services via ‘teletherapy’ affected speech-language therapists (SLTs) during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in 2020. SLTs reported on their experiences with the change from in-person to remote service delivery via two national surveys distributed at the start of the pandemic between April 2020 and July 2020. To explain SLTs’ survey responses, this dissertation introduced the Professional Adaptation Model (PA Model). The PA Model facilitated evaluation of the SLTs’ professional environment and the psychological constructs of their professional identity believed to influence the transition to speech-language teletherapy. Specifically, …

Relationships Between Sensory Reactivity, Restricted And Repetitive Behaviors, And Autonomic Nervous System Activity In Autistic And Non-Autistic Individuals, Sapir Elimaliah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current dissertation includes seven chapters. Chapter 1 includes my professional background and describes the experiences that led me to study restricted and repetitive behaviors. It also briefly describes my personal journey as an international graduate student. Chapter 2 is devoted to the rich literature that this dissertation is based on. The literature review covers both the foundational and most recent findings in the fields of sensory reactivity, restricted and repetitive behaviors, and autonomic activity, as well as the known relationships between these areas in autistic and non-autistic individuals. In Chapter 3, I describe in detail the methodology used in …

Antisocial Behavior And Callous Unemotional Traits In Youth: A Biosocial Approach, Yong Lin Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Early life presence of antisocial behavior (e.g., aggression/delinquency) and psychopathic/callous-unemotional (CU) traits (lacking empathy/remorse, shallow affect) are precursors to juvenile crime and criminal offending in adulthood. Etiological research on antisocial/CU tendencies has implicated both neurobiological (e.g., alterations in brain function and structure) and environmental (social adversity, prenatal stress) underpinnings. It has been proposed that reward and punishment processing deficits may induce problematic traits and behavior, such that antisocial/CU tendencies may be linked to hypersensitivity to rewards and hyposensitivity to punishment. Studies in this area have generated inconsistent findings and focused primarily on adult and clinical samples, leaving youth and community …

Linguistic Abstractions In Children’S Very Early Utterances, Qihui Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances; we use corpora to establish the development of multiword utterances and a probabilistic computational model to account for the quantitative change of early multiword utterances. We find that multiword utterances of different lengths appear early in acquisition and increase together, and the length growth pattern can be viewed as a probabilistic and dynamic process.

Chapter …

Virtual Reality Supplement To The Peers Social Skills Intervention For Adolescents With Asd, Kevin Ambrose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to replicate findings of the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relation Skills (PEERS) parent-assisted social skills training program for a diverse group of adolescents with historical autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses in an urban locality. Additionally, this study sought to pilot a 3D multi-user virtual environment for adolescent participants and an online learning community for parent coaches; both hypothesized to reinforce the social skills curriculum. A randomized controlled trial of PEERS was completed with 12 adolescents diagnosed with ASD with some participation from their caregivers. Results show that participants who received the …

Case Study: Exploring College Students’ Transformative Learning Experience Through Co-Creation Of A Pilot Compassionate Parenting Module In A Humanities Class, Maria Silvia Casabianca

Theses and Dissertations

A case study was conducted with 14 students who took a 16-week college humanities course at a regional university in the state of Florida. The core subjects of the course were kindness, compassion, and empathy. The instructor’s approach to teaching included methods akin to those of transformational learning. Data were collected from 14 weeks of reflective journals, semi-structured interviews, and compassionate parenting modules written by the participants as final assignments. Findings indicated that transformative learning practices supported participants’ reflection and identification of acquired beliefs and new learning about kindness, empathy, and compassion. Participants also described perceived benefits of kindness for …