A Developmental Assets Approach in East Africa: Can Swahili Measures Capture Adolescent Strengths and Supports?

From surviving to thriving: characterizing positive youth development among youth in Ethiopia

“…Studies on PYD across diverse cultural settings have shown the importance of assets for youth thriving (Benson et al, 1999;Benson, Scales, & Syvertsen, 2011;Scales, 2011;Scales et al, 2000;Scales, Roehlkepartain, & Fraher, 2012). Existing studies on African youth, such as Ugandan adolescents (Drescher, Chin, Johnson, & Johnson-Pynn, 2012), rural South African youth (Schwartz, Theron, & Scales, 2017), and East African youth (Drescher, Johnson, Kurz, Scales, & Kiliho, 2018;Schwartz et al, 2017) have also confirmed the power of assets in predicting youth thriving. Though the notion, research, and practice of PYD have burgeoned in the West, studies that characterize youth from this affirmative perspective are very much lacking in Africa and particularly in Ethiopia.…”

“…The finding that indicated youth's experience of assets in a vulnerable range is congruent with results of other international studies across diverse groups of youth. For instance, studies on youth in developing countries, such as Bangladesh, Honduras, Jordan, and Rwanda (Scales et al, 2012), Albania, Bangladesh, Japan, Lebanon and the Philippines (Scales, 2011), and Zulu youth in South Africa (Drescher et al, 2018) revealed similar asset profile of youth. However, the proportion of youth who reported assets in the good range (only 2%) was markedly lower in this study than youth studied in other countries.…”

“…The DAP total asset score ranges from 0 to 60 and interpreted in four levels as: 52-60 = Good, 42-51 = Adequate; 30-41 = Vulnerable; and <30 = highly vulnerable. DAP has been contextualized and widely used in more than 30 countries and numerous languages (Scales, Roehlkepartain, & Shramko, 2017) including in African settings (Drescher et al, 2018) and has demonstrated acceptable to excellent alpha reliabilities. It was adapted to the local language -Amharic and tried on randomly selected 200 youth as part of the current study and showed a very strong overall interrelatedness (α = 0.91).…”

Assessing Assets Among Street-Connected Youth: New Angles With Participatory Methods in Tanzania

“…Previous studies in Uganda and Tanzania demonstrated good internal consistencies for the DAP total (α = .91), external (α = .81), and internal (α = .88) scores, and convergent validity with other measures (Drescher et al, 2012). In a recent study of more than 1,200 adolescents in Tanzania, the Swahili DAP showed acceptable internal consistencies for total (α = .94), external (α = .88), and internal (α = .89) assets, and concurrent validity with other measures (Drescher, Johnson, Kurz, Scales, & Kiliho, 2018).…”

“…This was followed by evaluations for conceptual equivalence by a multilingual, multicultural team. Further details on the development and psychometrics of the Swahili DAP may be found in Drescher and colleagues’ (2018) psychometric report. Information on the Swahili DAP in relation to other majority world versions is available (Scales et al, 2017).…”