Exploring Developmental Assets in Ugandan Youth

Abstract

Ugandan youth face a number of threats to their healthy development including poverty, high rates of disease, civil conflict, and environmental degradation. Cultivating developmental competencies is critical, not only for youth, but also for the future of Ugandan communities and civil society. In this article, we highlight contextual challenges facing Ugandan youth, report exploratory results on “standard” measures of developmental assets, and discuss the utility of a positive youth development (PYD) framework in Uganda. Despite difficult circumstances, our results indicated high levels of internal and external assets as assessed with the Developmental Assets Profile (DAP). The DAP demonstrated acceptable internal consistencies and was correlated with two other measures of youth assets, self-efficacy, and civic action. Although researchers should proceed with caution when using psychometric measures in new cultural contexts, our results provide preliminary support for the use of the DAP and a PYD framework for advancing adolescent research and programming in Uganda.

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

“…Youth in the present study reported better experience of internal than external assets. This result is also consistent with findings from other studies (Alvarado & Ricard, 2013;Drescher et al, 2012;Scales et al, 2012;Theokas et al, 2005). Majority of the youth in the present study (68.1%) reported internal assets in the adequate (53.8%) or good (14.3%) range but significant proportion of them (63.8%) were lacking external assets.…”

“…Girls reported statistically significantly higher mean scores on DAP, asset categories, and asset contexts than their counter part boys did. The finding is consistent with results of other international studies (Benson et al, 1999;Drescher et al, 2012;Leffert et al, 1998;Scales et al, 2005), although it was somewhat unanticipated given the status of women in Ethiopia. Historically Ethiopian females have been in disadvantage in many ways and are still facing numerous threats to their life including poverty, several forms of gender based violence, migration, and illiteracy to mention a few.…”

“…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.…”

Developmental Assets and Academic Performance of Adolescents in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa

“…While developmental assets are mainly studied in US samples, the assets have also been reported in several non-US contexts, such as Albania, Bangladesh, Japan, Lebanon and the Philippines (Scales 2011), Italy, Norway and Turkey , Bulgaria and Kosovo (Wiium and Uka 2018) and Ghana (Wiium 2017). The present study is one of the few (e.g., Drescher et al 2012) reporting the assets among young people in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, the present findings extend the universality of the developmental assets.…”

“…First, a few of our participants were older than the usual adolescent groups that have been focused on in studies of the development assets. However, previous research has successfully studied the developmental assets where emerging adults, such as those involved in our study have been included (e.g., Drescher et al 2012;Scales 2011). Second, our participants are high school students who may not be representative of the youth population in the various countries.…”