Abstract:
Studying positive adolescent development requires an examination of the
mutually beneficial associations between youth and their environment. These youthcontext
relations include both the contributions that youth make to others and society and
the youth-context interactions that might predict positive youth outcomes. Community
and youth-serving organizations, where youth may be involved in decision-making roles
such as service delivery, advocacy, or on boards of directors, can provide one important
context for youth contributions and for positive adolescent development. Research on the
outcomes of youth involvement in organizational decision-making, however, is limited,
and largely consists of exploratory qualitative studies.
This dissertation is formatted as an integrated article dissertation. It begins with a
review of the literature on contexts of structured youth activities and positive youth
development. This review is intended to describe theory on development-context
relations, in which development is considered an interactive process that occurs between
individuals and their contexts, as it pertains the positive development of youth who are
involved in various structured activities (e.g., volunteering). This description follows with
a review of current research, and conclusions and rationale for the current studies.
Following this theoretical and research background, the dissertation includes
reports of two studies that were designed to address gaps in the research on youth
involvement in organizational decision-making. The first was a qualitative research
synthesis to elucidate and summarize the extant qualitative research on the outcomes of
youth involvement in organizational decision making on adults and organizations.
Results of this study suggested a number of outcomes for service provision, staff, and broader organizational functioning, including both benefits to organizations as well as
some costs. The second study was a quantitative analysis of the associations among youth
involvement, organizations' learning culture, and youth initiative, and relied on survey
data gathered from adults and youth in community-based organizations with youth
involvement. As expected, greater youth involvement in organizational decision making
was associated with higher learning culture within the organization. Two dimensions of
youth involvement, greater program engagement and relationships with adults, were
related to greater youth initiative. A third dimension, sense of ownership, was not- .-.-
associated with youth's level of initiative. Moreover, the association between
relationships with adults and youth initiative was only significant in organizations with
relatively low learning culture.
Despite some limitations, these studies contribute to the research literature by
providing some indication of the potential benefits and costs of youth involvement and by
making an important contribution toward the early stages of context-level analyses of
youth development. Findings have important implications for practitioners, funders,
future research, and lifespan development theory.
