Abstract
This article focuses on the interplay of research and practice (research⇔practice integration) in advancing international efforts to understand and enhance positive youth development (PYD). We discuss 3 facets of PYD research and application that have cross-cutting relevance to theory, to the use of theory for designing principles of PYD programs, and to evaluating whether specific instances of youth development programs have features that promote PYD. Using dynamic, relational developmental-systems-based concepts, we discuss the process of development involved in PYD, the use of the specificity principle to frame research and practice and, as a sample case illustrating how PYD research and practice can be advanced through the use of the specificity principle, we focus on one facet of PYD, that is, positive character, or character virtues. We point to important future directions for further illuminating the specificity of PYD process through assessing the developmental neurobiology of PYD, and we emphasize the important contributions that PYD research and practice integration can make worldwide to enhancing youth contributions to equity, social justice, and democracy.
Highlights
The Positive Youth Development (PYD) perspective has taken firm hold in the mind and imagination of developmental science, both in the United States and internationally
Individual distinctiveness; there will be a person-specific, or idiographic, component to each person’s life-span development. We elaborate on this idea in this article—an idea that is captured by the specificity principle (e.g., Bornstein, 2017, 2019b)—and we discuss the important role of this idea in understanding how mutually influential and mutually beneficial individual context coactions provide the basis of each young person’s specific positive youth development (PYD) pathway
Gansert, et al noted that the Bornstein (2017) specificity principle (SP) could be used to frame within-group assessments regarding which specific youth prosper in what specific ways in which specific programs; this framing was used in data analysis from 888 Salvadoran youth (50% female), aged 9 to 15 years, participating in the Compassion International (CI) Study of PYD (Lerner et al, 2019)
Summary
Alvarado et al, 2017; Cabrera & Leyendecker, 2017; Koller et al, 2019; Leman et al, 2017; Lerner et al, 2021; Petersen et al, 2017; Silbereisen & Lerner, 2007). We focus on the process of development involved in PYD because deeper understanding of this process is required for devising useful models for the development of positive features of youth development, for designing programs promoting such development, and for evaluating that these design principles are part of any specific PYD program. The key idea promoted by this metatheory is that mutually influential relations between a specific individual and the specific features of the individual’s context constitute the fundamental process of human development These relations are typically represented in the developmental science literature as individual context relations and, in RDS-based models, may be represented as individual context coactions (Lerner, 2018b). We close this article with a discussion of important future directions for the illumination of the specificity of PYD process (regarding the developmental neurobiology of PYD and, of character virtues) and of the importance of research practice integration in promoting equity, social justice, and democracy by enhancing PYD through youth programs
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