Development and Validation of a Measure of Positive Youth Development

Purpose:  Positive Youth Development (PYD) is a resilience-based framework that accentuates positive traits and resources in the lives of children and youth.  PYD constructs include well-defined individual and social characteristics that are hypothesized to promote healthy child and adolescent development. These constructs include the 5 C’s of competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring/compassion. However, measures to assess PYD constructs and to evaluate the effects of PYD-informed interventions for children and youth are lacking. To address this gap, we developed and tested a measure of PYD with a sample of children and youth participating in an urban afterschool program.   In this presentation, we describe steps used to develop the instrument. Psychometric properties obtained from five waves data collection are presented and described.

Methods:  The Bridge-PYD instrument was created using questions based on existing PYD literature and expert review. Once the survey was developed, 140 youth, ages 7-18, were recruited from an afterschool program that uses a PYD intervention framework. Subjects  completed the measure over a series of five different time points for the purpose of revising questions and determining psychometric properties.  Analytic techniques informed by Item Response Theory (IRT) were used to understand individual questions and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess model fit. Paired comparison tests were  then conducted to determine changes in PYD constructs over time.

Results:   Results reveal that the instrument provides a reliable measure of  PYD constructs of competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring/compassion. Chronbach’s alpha for the overall scale reliability was .93; reliabilities on the subscales ranged from .69 to .91.  IRT statistics indicated that  individual questions provided a good fit, with an infit score of 1.06(zstd=.0) and outfit of 1.07(zstd=.0). Using a confirmatory factor analysis to verify findings, fit statistics revealed a good fit, with the GFI at .996, the TLI at .997 and the RMSEA at .022 and all factor loading estimates for the subscales were statistically significant at p<.001.   Finally, longitudinal analyses indicated that the Bridge-PYD was sensitive to change over time, with participants reporting significantly higher overall PYD scores at posttest (t= 2.63, p<.01). 

Implications:  Psychometric properties of the Bridge-PYD reveal the promise and utility of measuring PYD constructs in community-based programs for children and youth. The measure offers both a practical application for program evaluation activities and the basis to measure theoretical constructs specified in established PYD models. Implications for using the Bridge-PYD in community-based programs for children and youth are described.