Abstract
The study of positive youth development (PYD) requires theory-based methodological considerations pertinent to measurement, research and program design, and data analysis. We outline the appropriate steps that researchers and program evaluators must enact to address these methodological foci in their respective attempts to describe, explain, and optimize the course of positive development among diverse youth around the world. We focus on longitudinal (developmental) research designed to evaluate programs promoting PYD in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where life challenges are shaped by multiple adverse situations associated with racism, poverty, gender inequalities, political inequities, and the absence of adequate health and medical resources. Using the Compassion International Study of PYD as a sample case, we suggest how researchers and practitioners might collaborate to enact rigorous, theory-based research aimed at promoting PYD among youth living in LMICs and worldwide.
Highlights
In developmental research, the x-axis is most often some index of time, and the points in time used in a developmental study should be selected based on when transformations in the quality of thinking, feeling, behaving, etc., should occur
As documented in the chapters of Sustainable Development Across the Life Course: Evidence from Longitudinal Research, edited by Prerna Banati (2021), repeated measures of youth must be taken at points in their lives during which there is a theoretical basis for expecting either changing features of the process of development to occur and/or optimal times in adolescence within which to enact interventions to enhance the course of positive developmental change
As exemplified by Banati (2021) and Petersen et al (2017), and by the special section of Child Development edited by Leman et al (2017), interest in longitudinal studies of positive youth development (PYD) in settings outside the United States has burgeoned across the second decade of the 21st century
Summary
Discussions of developmental methodology emphasize that theory should guide all decisions about methods to be used to study developmental change (e.g., Card, 2017; Collins, 2006; Little et al, 2009). Many researchers and program evaluators consider only reliability and validity in regard to psychometric quality, in the study of development it is essential to address the issue of measurement invariance (equivalence) This issue addresses the question of whether a measure has comparable meaning across time, place, and people (Card, 2017). If such measures are used, researchers and program evaluators can attend to issues pertinent to maximizing the chances that the design and analysis of developmental data advance understanding of how PYD may be promoted
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