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dc.contributor.authorRamey, Heather
dc.date.accessioned2012-07-31T19:55:42Z
dc.date.available2012-07-31T19:55:42Z
dc.date.issued2012-07-31
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10464/4079
dc.description.abstractStudying 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.en_US
dc.publisherBrock Universityen_US
dc.subjectYouth Involvementen_US
dc.subjectdecision-makingen_US
dc.titleYouth Involvement in Organizational Decision Making: The Connection to Youth Initiative and Organizational Functioningen_US
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertationen
dc.degree.namePh.D. Psychologyen_US
dc.degree.levelDoctoralen_US
dc.contributor.departmentDepartment of Psychologyen_US
dc.degree.disciplineFaculty of Social Sciencesen_US
refterms.dateFOA2021-08-02T02:20:04Z


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