Session: Achieving Growth in Strengths to Ensure the Healthy Development of All Youth (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

Social work espouses the importance of strengths-based practice and research. Rather than exclusively focusing on diagnosing problems and identifying deficits in individuals, strengths-based practice encourages a focus on identifying, developing, and leveraging strengths to improve practice outcomes (e.g Saleebey, 1996). Some strengths have been identified as important to ensuring healthy youth development, including bonding, relationship permanence, prosocial peer and school connections, resilience, social emotional competence, and prosocial norms (Catalano et al., 2004). Although a focus on strengths has been integrated into many aspects of social work education and practice, little is known about how strengths actually grow in the context of social service provision. Understanding the growth of youth strengths across time can help practitioners determine the most salient strengths to target and provide empirical guidance to determine right-sized service goals.

Research assessing the growth of strengths is needed to determine which strengths are malleable in response to intervention, at what rate, for whom, and under what conditions (Cosden et al., 2004). To become more than a practice ideal or a conceptual framework, social work needs empirical guidance for the practice of strength-based social work. This symposium includes studies that assess the growth of strengths during contact with a public behavioral health system, a youth development program, and school-based services. Each using a multilevel framework to account for clustering, these papers together explore how strengths develop over time, across different contexts, and vary in growth by individual child characteristics (i.e., gender, race).  

The first study explores the growth of strengths among youth in contact with a large, urban, public System of Care, based on assessment data collected over a year. Findings suggest that youth strengths grew over time, and most of the growth occurred in the first six months. Youth with higher levels of psychiatric symptoms and exposure to trauma at entry experienced more growth in strengths over time.

The second study examines the growth of Social Emotional Competence (SEC) among students participating in an after-school leadership program across 25 California elementary schools. Findings suggest that students improved by an average of four T-score points over the course of the year. Females had higher initial levels of SEC, but males had a higher rate of growth. White students had higher levels of initial SEC than black students, but black students had a higher rate of growth relative to white students.

The third study examines the growth of Social Emotional Competence (SEC) through a district-wide social emotional learning initiative in Pennsylvania. The findings suggest that SEC grew over time for youth exposed to the PATHS program but the rate of growth varied significantly by gender, race, and implementation conditions.

This symposium offers empirical evidence to inform how we might expect strengths to grow while youth receive social services. Across all services, it seems like youth who need strengths the most, aquire them fastest in response to intervention. Together, these studies can inform services seeking to build strengths to promote the healthy development of youth.