"We Can Form the Program the Way We Want It to be": The Perspectives of Black and Latine Youth Living in Under-Resourced Communities about Their out-of-School Program's Mechanisms of Positive Personal Change

Background and Purpose

Structured out-of-school programs (OSPs) can be contexts in which youth can be producers of their own positive change (Eccles & Gootman, 2002) and experience lasting benefits through the internalization of out-of-school offerings. There is considerable research documenting the dynamic impacts of participating in OSPs. However, there is a lack of knowledge about what specific program mechanisms contribute to positive personal change processes, especially from the perspectives of youth of color. As a result, many OSPs and interventions designed for youth of color rely on practitioners’ or researchers’ perspectives of program functionality and youths’ change processes, excluding youth from expressing their opinions. Program impacts for youth may be weakened too, since average OSP attendance rates hover around 50%.

Methods

To address this gap, this study of a participatory-focused OSP with a 90% or better attendance rate identified the programmatic mechanisms that youth found helpful. Using a critical realist scientific paradigm to conduct an interpretive, phenomenological qualitative examination (Denzin, 1989), the study addresses the research question: According to youth, what is it about the OSP that supports their personal growth?

Data were gathered from 212 youth participants enrolled in OSPs in four neighborhoods in Chicago over a 17-year timespan. Data consists of youths’ peer-to-peer program evaluation interviews with each other, using a youth-designed protocol, at the conclusion of each program. Qualitative peer-to-peer interviews were analyzed with NVivo12 using a causal thematic and content process analysis (Maxwell, 2004). The data were coded to generate themes and compile a coding manual. Inter-rater reliability of the coding manual was achieved at 91%, which preceded the full analysis of data (Miles et al., 2019).

Results

Several program mechanisms of change from youths’ interviews emerged as crucial elements that help youth accomplish desired changes. These mechanisms lead to specific guidelines for intervention providers, elucidated in this study.

These mechanisms can be theorized as follows,

A. Relationally-oriented mechanisms:

(1) Having respectful, caring, and affirming relationships among peers and instructors;

(2) Sharing relational pleasure with peers and instructors: Finding joy, having fun, and celebrating;

(3) Integrating reflective, empathetic Humanistic group therapy (Page et al., 2001) components into programming.

B. Positive Identity-oriented mechanisms to counteract negative social messages:

(4) Youth finding accurate, positive versions of themselves in how instructors related with them;

C. Supporting youths’ development of skills and future goals to accomplish positive life trajectories:

(5) Nurturing youths’ existing aspirational capital (Yosso, 2005) and accompanying them in future-building;

(6) Making available to them an individualized, Street-Based Social Work model of care providing trauma-oriented treatment and multi-systemic advocacy (McCrea et al., 2024).

Conclusions and Implications

Overall, the findings from this research indicate that deriving theory about interventions’ change mechanisms from the reflections and expertise of those who experience and participate in the intervention can add valuable theoretical elements for practice and research. With a practice knowledge base rooted in this study’s findings about youths’ subjective meanings and experiences of services, social work practitioners can design practice models that are more suitable and relevant to youths’ cultural strengths.