Abstract
The aim of the present study was to examine whether early adolescents’ positive development (i.e., resilience and psychological wellbeing) could be enhanced by stimulating three dimensions of self-awareness: emotional self-regulation, self-esteem, and self-reflection. An experimental field study (randomized controlled trial) was conducted. Seventh grade students (N = 1299; Mage = 12.38; 54% boys) completed multiple assessments at the beginning, during, and immediately after the intervention or at parallel time points for students in the control condition. Changes in the assessed constructs were examined with parallel process latent growth curve models. The results showed that increases in emotional self-regulation and self-esteem were related to concurrent increases in both resilience and psychological wellbeing. Changes in self-reflection were, however, not related to changes in these outcomes. The trajectories of change and parallel processes were similar in the intervention and control condition. These findings suggest that interventions aiming to stimulate positive youth development might be optimized by also focusing on youth’s self-awareness, though more knowledge about how self-awareness can be stimulated best is needed. This trial was registered in the Dutch Trial Register, number NL6371 (old number: NTR6554), on July 3, 2017.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11121-022-01345-9.
Highlights
Studying how positive youth development can be stimulated is pivotal since positive outcomes can provide foundations for healthy development as well as function as protective factors for decreasing problem behaviors (Greenberg et al, 2017)
In order to include all participants in the models, full information maximum likelihood (FIML) procedures were used with robust maximum likelihood estimation (MLR) to obtain parameter estimates, which is robust to non-normality and non-independence of observations
We examined whether changes in youth’s self-awareness were related to concurrent changes in positive development, as suggested in CASEL’s conceptual framework (Greenberg et al, 2017)
Summary
Studying how positive youth development can be stimulated is pivotal since positive outcomes can provide foundations for healthy development as well as function as protective factors for decreasing problem behaviors (Greenberg et al, 2017). Youth’s resilience (i.e., the ability to adapt to change and stressful events in a healthy and flexible way; Catalano et al, 2004) and psychological wellbeing (i.e., the presence of positive feelings and absence of negative feelings; Ravens-Sieberer & The European KIDSCREEN Group, 2006) appear important positive outcomes to strengthen (Benson et al, 2007; Catalano et al, 2004). Self-awareness has been indicated by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) as an important competence that provides a foundation for. A high level of self-awareness is characterized by recognition of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and actions, as well as feeling accepted by others (Greenberg et al, 2017; Sutton, 2016).
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