Youth Developmental Assets in Global Perspective: Results from International Adaptations of the Developmental Assets Profile

Abstract

The Developmental Assets Profile (DAP) measures young people’s reported experience of eight categories of developmental assets known to be linked to numerous indicators of well-being, including Support, Empowerment, Boundaries and Expectations, Constructive Use of Time, Commitment to Learning, Positive Values, Social Competencies, and Positive Identity. The DAP scales were found to have acceptable to good alpha reliabilities, stability reliabilities, and validity in U.S. sample field testing. DAP data have been or are currently being collected in more than a dozen countries. This paper reports on DAP data from five countries whose DAP samples were sufficiently large—Albania, Bangladesh, Japan, Lebanon, and the Philippines—to warrant an initial summary of how well the DAP appears to work in a range of diverse cultural settings, and how the youth asset profiles observed in those studies compare to U.S. levels found in the development of the DAP. Most of the DAP subscales had acceptable internal consistency reliabilities, and some had acceptable stability reliabilities, in these international samples. Where validity was examined, findings were similar to results found for U.S. samples. These results suggest that the DAP can be effectively adapted and used to study positive youth development in other cultural settings, including, with some qualifications, use in youth program monitoring, evaluation, and improvement. Across all countries, including the U.S., the least well-experienced asset scale was Constructive Use of Time, and the least asset-rich context was Community. These results help illuminate those aspects of youths’ developmental experience that appear to be important and similarly-experienced parts of adolescent development regardless of the adolescent's cultural context. The study thus has potentially important contributions to make in the realms of cross-cultural psychology, developmental psychology, community psychology, and applied developmental science.