Bidirectional Associations Between Valued Activities and Adolescent Positive Adjustment in a Longitudinal Study: Positive Mood as a Mediator

Abstract

Although activity involvement has been linked to positive youth development, the value that adolescents place on these activities (i.e., how much they enjoy the activities, find them important, and spend time on them) has received less attention. The purpose of the present study was to examine the bidirectional longitudinal association between engagement in valued activities and adolescent positive adjustment (optimism, purpose in life, and self-esteem), as well as investigate a possible underlying mechanism for this link. High school students (N = 2,270, 48.7% female) from Ontario, Canada completed questionnaires annually in grades 10, 11, and 12. Auto-regressive cross-lagged path analyses were conducted over time, controlling for gender, parental education, and academic grades. Greater engagement in valued activities predicted higher optimism, purpose, and self-esteem over time. Importantly, the results did not support an alternate hypothesis of selection effects, in that adolescents who were better adjusted were not more likely than their peers to engage in valued activities over time. We also found that the longitudinal associations between valued activities and positive adjustment may be due partly to an underlying effect of increased positive mood. Thus, engagement in valued activities appears to be important for adolescent positive adjustment, and may help to foster thriving. Communities, educators, and parents should actively support and encourage adolescents to develop valued activities, and seek to ensure that there are ample opportunities and resources available for them to do so.

Time Use as Cause and Consequence of Youth Development

“…In other words, perhaps due to low self-efficacy and social support (26), less well-adjusted youth may fail to pick niches involving activities that promote development, and they may spend more time idling (4); however, we found no indication that idling, because of its lack of focus and direction (14), leads to less positive youth development (2). However, other researchers, using methods similar to ours (13,27), and cross-lagged models (11,28), have documented bidirectional links between the nature of youth's activities and youth's competencies and adjustment, and in one study, we uncovered transactional relations between activity contexts and youth outcomes (24). Taken together, to advance understanding of daily activities as both causes and consequences of youth development, researchers should assess time use and youth outcomes at multiple time points and, using experimental designs, test the effects of interventions to promote youth involvement in constructive activities.…”

“…First, self‐selection into activities remains an important confound. Apart from randomized experimental designs, the quest for causal inference can rely on statistical approaches, such as using longitudinal data with strong controls , cross‐lagged models to test for alternative directions of effect , and multilevel modeling to examine within‐person associations . Second, as advocated by Cattell , researchers must consider the representativeness of data on time use along the dimensions of persons (i.e., whether the sample is representative of a population), variables (e.g., whether many methods and measures are used to tap the different dimensions of daily activities), and occasions (i.e., whether variables capture variation across place and time).…”

Measuring psychological engagement in youth activity involvement☆

“…Indeed, the conceptualization of youth activity engagement as comprising multiple but interrelated components has been a unifying theme among the varying engagement definitions proposed by researchers (e.g., Bohnert et al., 2010; Pancer et al., 2002; Weiss et al., 2005). Recent theoretical and empirical advances clearly support such a multidimensional view of participation, involving both psychological and behavioral components (DesRoches & Willoughby, 2014; Rose‐Krasnor, 2009; Roth et al., 2010).…”

Friendship, Negative Peer Experiences, and Daily Positive and Negative Mood

“…Much of the existing research on NPEs examines longer‐term emotional adjustment, such as depression and aggression. Mood (both positive and negative) may mediate the association between NPEs and broader emotional adjustment (DesRoches & Willoughby, ; Sigfusdottir, Asgeirsdottir, Gudjonsson, & Sigurdsson, ; Williams, Cheung, & Choi, ). Daily events can temporarily influence mood states whereas emotional adjustment may be more stable (Peeters, Nicolson, Berkhof, Delespaul, & deVries, ).…”