Predicting Contribution in High Achieving Black and Latinx Youth: The Role of Critical Reflection, Hope, and Mentoring

Contemporary approaches to adolescent development are framed by positive youth development models. A key outcome of these models is that healthy and positively developing youth are more likely to contribute to their family, schools, and communities. However, little work on contribution and its antecedents has been conducted with youth of color. As high achieving youth of color often become leaders in their communities, it is important to consider malleable predictors of contribution within this population. Therefore, through a cross-sectional design, we examined the relations between youth critical reflection, hopeful future expectations, and mentoring relationship quality and youth contribution in a sample of 177 youth of color (60% Black, 40% Latinx) attending an afterschool college preparation program at six sites around the U.S. Results indicated that youth critical reflection, hopeful future expectations, and mentoring relationship quality significantly predicted contribution. Exploratory analyses suggested that these relations were significant for Black youth but not Latinx youth. Implications of these findings for future scholarship are discussed.

Illuminating the Use of the Specificity Principle to Go Inside the Black Box of Programs

The UN 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for disaggregating results of program effectiveness within subgroups. Using the Bornstein (2017) specificity principle, involving within-group assessments regarding what specific youth prosper in what specific ways in what specific programs, we analyzed data from 888 Salvadoran youth (50% female), aged 9–15 years ( M = 11.60 years, SD = 1.7), participating in the Compassion International (CI) Study of Positive Youth Development (PYD). We compared CI-supported youth with non-CI-supported youth on nine variables related to PYD, intentional self-regulation, hopeful future expectations, and spirituality. Whereas tests of group averages indicated no meaningful differences, disaggregated results across 20 program sites indicated that 2 sites showed no group differences, 7 sites showed better CI-supported youth performance, 3 sites showed better non-CI-supported youth performance, and 8 sites showed a mixed pattern. We discuss the use of the specificity principle in future assessments of SDG indicators.