Creation of Short and Very Short Measures of the Five Cs of Positive Youth Development

Abstract

As developmental scientists seek to index the strengths of adolescents and adopt the positive youth development (PYD) perspective, psychometrically sound measurement tools will be needed to assess adolescents' positive attributes. Using a series of exploratory factor analyses and CFA models, this research creates short and very short versions of the scale used to measure the Five Cs of PYD in the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development. We created separate forms for earlier versus later adolescence and ensured that items displayed sufficient conceptual overlap across forms to support tests of factorial invariance. We discuss implications for further scale development and advocate for the use of these convenient tools, especially in research and applications pertinent to the Five Cs model of PYD. AbstractAs developmental scientists seek to index the strengths of adolescents and adopt the Positive Youth Development (PYD) perspective, psychometrically sound measurement tools will be needed to assess adolescents' positive attributes. Using a series of EFA and CFA models, this research creates short and very short versions of the scale used to measure the Five Cs of PYD in the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development. We created separate forms for earlier versus later adolescence and ensured that items displayed sufficient conceptual overlap across forms to support tests of factorial invariance. We discuss implications for further scale development and advocate for the use of these convenient tools, especially in research and applications pertinent to the Five Cs model of PYD.Keywords: positive youth development, scale validation, short form, five Cs DEVELOPMENT OF SHORT PYD SCALES 3The Creation and Validation of Short and Very Short Measures of PYD Over the past two decades, the development and use of positive indicators of child wellbeing have increased substantially (Lippman et al., 2011;O'Hare, 2012). The primary movement framing this work has been the positive youth development (PYD; J. Lerner, Phelps, Forman, & Bowers, 2009; J. Lerner et al., 2012) perspective. PYD has been conceptualized in several ways and several theoretical frameworks have been posited (for a review, see J. Lerner et al., 2012).As these models become more popular with individuals working to enhance the positive growth of young people (Beets et al., 2009;Duerden, Witt, Fernandez, Bryant, & Theriault, 2012;; Kurtines et al., 2008), it is important that they are empirically useful, can be widely applied, and include constructs that are specific and measurable. However, these models are just beginning to be tested and there is still a great need for indicators of many instantiations of PYD (Lippman et al., 2011;O'Hare, 2012). Recent work has attempted to evaluate youth development frameworks (Heck & Subramaniam, 2009) The purpose of this report is to provide information about a questionnaire developed to assess PYD based on the Lerner and Lerner Five Cs Model of PYD (Bowers et al., 2010;Lerner et al., 2005). This approach employs...

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