Physical activity-based positive youth development (PYD) programs are designed to nurture personal and social assets in youth, and in underserved populations, often provide unique opportunities for physical activity and mentoring. Supportive relationships with peers and adults in such programs are associated with positive changes in developmental outcomes (Ullrich-French, McDonough, & Smith, 2012). In this case study, we examined youths' and staff members' perspectives on interpersonal relationships within a physical activity-based PYD program, their understanding of what experiences and interactions within the program help or hinder forming high-quality relationships, and their perspectives on how those relationships affect youth and transfer to contexts outside of the PYD program. We interviewed 20 youth and 6 program staff about their perspectives on social experiences in the PYD program, and conducted follow-up interviews with 10 youth participants 8 months later. We developed a figure describing youth and staff perspectives of program context factors, and how elements of interpersonal relationships among youth and between youth and staff affect youth intra-and interpersonal assets, and transfer to community contexts such as home, neighborhoods, and school. These findings provide insight into ways to promote positive social relationships in PYD programs in ways that are meaningful to youth.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether youth perceptions of staff support predicted their behavioral and emotional engagement in a physical activity-based positive youth development (PYD) program and the degree to which these associations were moderated by staff's gender and racial/ethnic similarity to youth. A total of 229 low-income youth (aged 7-15; 59% male; 48.5% Hispanic, 22.3% White, and 16.6% Black) were surveyed at the end of a 20-day summer program with questions assessing leader support, behavioral and emotional engagement, and self-reported demographic information. Eighteen staff leaders (M age ϭ 20.72; 33% male; 78% White) were also surveyed at a single time-point to self-report demographic information. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Staff support positively predicted both behavioral and emotional engagement. Matches between youth and their staff leader on both gender and race/ethnicity directly predicted behavioral engagement, whereas the effect of staff support on emotional engagement was enhanced for youth dissimilar in race/ethnicity to their leader. Staff support may promote engagement in PYD programs, with the similarity of staff to youth on race and gender impacting the manner in which engagement is realized. This study demonstrates the importance of teaching staff the value of interactions with youth from different backgrounds and genders to promote engagement in the programs and support PYD outcomes for all youth.

This paper presents the application of a meta-analysis approach to the evaluation of youth-learning data from the nationally distributed This is How We “Role” program. The application of meta-analysis for examining the impact of other multisite youth programs encountering similar data analysis challenges is discussed. At each This is How We “Role” program site, university partners collected data to examine youth-participant learning. Data analysis from these unique sites was challenging as the approach had to accommodate the innate heterogeneity across sites due to differences in implementation, sample size, and learning context. The meta-analysis method revealed details of the underlying variation between sites that could be masked by typical regression approaches, estimated overall program effects, examined subgroups and identified heterogeneity across project sites. The results showed the This is How We “Role” program generally increased learning at each site and as a whole, even though the program effects varied across sites. This example demonstrates the utility of using the meta-analysis approach to similar multi-site youth development programs.