A Landscape Scan of Measures for Youth Strengths Across Individual, Family, School, and Community Settings
A new report published by Search Institute, with support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, provides a guide to tools that measure existing strengths in a young person’s life. A Landscape Scan of Measures for Youth Strengths Across Individual, Family, School and Community Settings discusses how assessing strengths as well as risks or challenges can help practitioners better support the needs of the youth they serve. The report details measures, their contexts (community, family, etc.) and how they might be used in improvement or evaluation efforts.
This report is for practitioners and community-based researchers who are interested in measuring the strengths that contribute to young people’s positive development in various ecological contexts (e.g., their families, friendships, schools, and communities). Finding data collection tools that are vetted and strengths-based can feel a bit overwhelming. In the mass library of practitioner-developed, researcher-developed, nationally-standardized, and community-specific tools, it can be hard to tease out what might appropriately meet your needs. It can be especially hard if you’re working in and with communities of color, or with older youth populations (between 18-25 years old), for whom tool development is underdeveloped. We spent 6 months talking with positive youth development program providers and reviewing the literature to compile measures of young people’s ecological strengths. While this list is not exhaustive, it is comprehensive. It has emerged from many hours of sifting through websites, journal articles, construct lists, and documents from program providers to put together a resource that we hope is useful to you as you measure youth ecological strengths in your research, improvement, or evaluation efforts toward Positive Youth Development (PYD).