Development and Validation of the Youth Employment Hope Scale (YEHS)

Purpose: The purpose of this study is twofold.  First, it is to validate the factor structure of the Youth Employment Hope Scale (YEHS) as a tool to evaluate disconnected youths’ empowerment path to employment. Second, it is to examine the effectiveness of a summer youth employment program using the YEHS metric.  The YEHS is a client-centered measure capturing an aspect of multi-dimensional psychological self-sufficiency (PSS) as a process-driven assessment tool. As suggested by a growing body of research on non-cognitive development, career counseling, vocational education, and academic outcomes among disadvantaged youth, hope is an essential concept for one to become economically self-sufficient.  However, this has yet to be tested in the context of employment training for low-income young adults who have a higher probability of dropping out of high-school and who lack job skills and educational credentials to join the workforce.

Methods: The Employment Hope Scale (EHS) was originally designed to measure a dimension of PSS in adult jobseeker population. It represents the non-cognitive skills that include hope and motivation. EHS has empirically been found to contribute to economic self-sufficiency (ESS).  This study looks to modify the adult version of EHS and apply to disconnected youth seeking to enter the workforce. The sample included 255 low-income youth who were enrolled in a summer youth employment program at a social service agency in Chicago in the summer of 2013.  They were surveyed at the beginning and end of the 4 week employment program. A confirmatory factor analysis test (CFA) was conducted on the initial 24-item 6-facor theoretical mode of the EHS.  Given adequate fit of CFA, a structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was conducted to investigate the pathways from PSS to ESS. As a measurement of ESS, we used the WEN Economic Self-Sufficiency Scale. AMOS 7.0 was used to perform the CFA and SEM using maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method. Full information maximum likelihood (FIML) was employed to handle missing data.

Results: The CFA results indicated that the adult EHS does not fit the youth data. Based on inappropriate model fit (NNFI=.892), EHS had to be modified. The new model (YEHS) revealed a 5 factor, 18 question scale. Strong convergent validity evidence was found for YEHS, as all the subscales displayed strong positive correlation with self-efficacy, resilience, and children’s hope scale. The discriminant validity evidence was found with low correlations between all the subscales of YEHS and gender.  SEM results suggested a significant positive path from YEHS to ESS.  A paired samples t-test (n=174) concluded that one of the factor of YEHS—self-perceived capabilities—was significant (t=-2.254, p> 0.05). 

Conclusion: This study validated the YEHS as a scale developed to assess non-cognitive skills among low-income disconnected youth entering the workforce.  The summer youth employment program seems to have improved the level of belief that one is capable of achieving the goals.  Other factors of the YEHS has the potential to be used as areas for youth empowerment particularly in the context of program development and evaluation in workforce development for disconnected youth.