INTERNATIONAL CHILD AND YOUTH CARE NETWORK

12 FEBRUARY 2001 EXTRA
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The Role of Primary Supports

Community programs are a vastly untapped resource for meeting (the) needs (of) young adolescents.... Community organizations play a vital role in fostering healthy youth development. Despite evidence that youth programs can promote constructive behavior and reduce high-risk behavior, few American communities now seize the opportunity to create or strengthen these programs. More than 17,000 national and local youth organizations operate in the United States. Religious youth groups, sports organizations, adult service organizations, museums, public libraries, and recreation departments also offer community-based programs. All these organizations can do much more to meet the needs of young adolescents than they now do.

  — The Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development

 

Creating environments where young people can feel good about themselves, explore opportunities, and master new skills is at the heart of most of the best primary supports programs. The best of these programs offer young people places where they can find caring adults who believe that they are worthy of their time and organizations willing to invest their resources in engaging youth in activities that promote skill development and a positive sense of self. Whether called primary supports, community programs, or youth-serving organizations, these programs offer the potential of a meaningful support system to children, youth, and their families as young people try to navigate their path from infancy to adulthood. These programs often combine support to parents through supervision of children during non-school hours with helping young people to discover their talents and explore possibilities. At their best, primary supports programs have the potential to help families and communities to promote the healthy development of our nation’s children.

According to the Carnegie Council’s report, 66 percent of all young people are involved in activities in the over 17,000 youth-serving organizations they identified throughout the United States. (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1992) Outside the constraints of the school day, these programs offer recreational, educational, and other youth-development opportunities with the potential for broadening young people’s experiences, increasing their competencies, and providing them with safe and positive options for the time they spend apart from family and school. The Carnegie report, along with a number of others, strongly asserts the importance of exploring the potential of these programs to meet the varied needs of children and families. (Gambone, 1997; Pittman, 1991; Wynn, 1994)

Yet documenting the impact of these programs is challenging for a number of important reasons: First, both individually and collectively, the goals of these programs tend to be diverse, ambitious, and often abstract, making it difficult to measure progress toward reaching them. Further, without the benefit of classic research design with random assignment and a control group, it is difficult to isolate the impact of a program’s involvement on a child from the effects of school, family, and other community or family resources. Additionally, the very nature of many of these programs— small staffs, shifting programming, and an informality that may make follow-up difficult, further contribute to the challenge of systematically measuring benefits.

Many of the studies that have been done are vulnerable to methodological criticisms regarding such factors as their use of convenience samples or the lack of a meaningful control group. As a result of these methodological limitations, most studies are only able to report positive correlations rather than documented outcomes. Despite these limitations, there does appear to be increasing evidence that involvement in constructive activities, such as those offered by primary supports during non-structured after-school time, is associated with positive outcomes, and that specific programs may be achieving some specific goals.

The Carnegie study suggests that positive outcomes may be "a matter of time—time spent constructively on the one hand or potentially engaging in risky behavior on the other. As outlined in the Carnegie study, "The 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) indicated that about 27 percent of eighth graders spent 2 or more hours at home alone after school. Those in the lowest socioeconomic group were most likely to be at home alone for more than 3 hours." The report goes on to highlight studies suggesting that these unsupervised after-school hours are positively associated with such high-risk behaviors as drug abuse, delinquency, and adolescent sexual activity.

A study by Reginald Clark found that one predictor of success in school was whether or not a young person spent 20 to 35 hours a week engaged in "constructive learning activities." Although his study did not suggest that those activities must or should be pursued through a youth-serving agency, it did suggest that for young people faced with significant blocks of unsupervised time, youth-serving agencies offer an easy and accessible option that does not require young people to be supervised by their parents or to be entirely self-motivating in arranging their own constructive time.’ (Clark, 1988)

Another study suggests an association between extracurricular activities and later educational attainment. Hanks and Eckland took a nonrandom sample in 1970 of respondents to a 1955 survey of high school sophomores. This study found that students who participated in extracurricular activities went on to higher educational achievement and to have an increased rate of participation in adult voluntary organizations. Holland found that participation in organized activities was positively associated with higher self-esteem, grades, educational aspirations, and sense of control over lives, and with lower occurrence of delinquency. Although these studies found associations, they do not, of course, prove causality.

Gambone and Arbreton took a very different approach to looking at the impact of youth-serving organizations and their activities. Rather than looking at the influence of youth programs on variables that are beyond the agency’s direct control, they developed a set of questions designed to measure the degree to which young people coming to youth-serving organizations were provided with seven key developmental experiences and supports. (Hanks, 1978) Looking at three of the major national youth-serving agencies, they found that these organizations were attracting a "reasonably diverse" group of young people, one-quarter to one-third of whom spend a significant proportion of their discretionary time at the agency, participating almost daily. They further found that 80 percent of participants in the organizations’ programs experienced exposure to three or more of the seven developmental building blocks (experiences and supports) measured, with 25 percent receiving exposure to six or more.

Other studies have looked at the apparent impact of specific programs. Switzer (1986) found what he asserts to be a strong positive impact on self-image, attitudes, and altruistic behavior for boys who participated in a school-based helper program as compared to boys who did not participate. Girls, however, did not show a similar effect. A study of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America’s substance-abuse prevention program yielded an unanticipated finding: although they found little evidence of direct impact on drug use among participants, they found what they believe to be strong evidence that the existence of a Boys & Girls Club in a housing project was associated with an overall reduction in alcohol and other drug use, drug trafficking, and other drug-related crime throughout the housing project more broadly. (Boys & Girls Clubs of America, 1991)

Another study, this one of the Youth Opportunities Unlimited program model funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, targeted eleven poor inner-city neighborhoods working to "develop innovative approaches for addressing the needs of youth by creating a range of opportunities for youth to complete their education, prepare for employment and post-secondary education, and obtain assistance with personal problems by encouraging links among education, employment, social services, juvenile justice, recreation programs, and other community-based activities." The evaluation, which compared neighborhood statistics with citywide and national data, suggested that neighborhoods offering a Youth Opportunities Unlimited program experienced reductions in teen live births, juvenile arrests, and dropout rates. (Orr, 1997)

In one of the few studies using random assignment and a control group, the evaluation of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program found that involvement with a Big Brother or Big Sister was associated with positive behavioral outcomes as well as a positive impact on peer and family relationships. The young people matched with Big Brothers or Sisters were less likely to start using drugs and alcohol, less likely to hit someone, and more likely to demonstrate improved school attendance and performance, as well as improved attitudes toward completing school work.

In their review of research studies related to youth-serving agencies, Pittman and Wright found studies that they believed document positive impacts of youth-serving organizations in every competence area they had identified as important for young people. Although many of these studies documented associations rather than outcomes, Pittman and Wright’s assessment, based on their review, is that: "These organizations and programs do more than fill a small void in young people’s lives. They develop personal and social skills through structured programs, provide sustained interaction with adults and peers, and link the youth to the larger community. These opportunities complement the formal learning found in schools, and the research reviewed suggests they are valued and important." (Pittman, 1991)

Despite growing evidence that primary supports offer a potentially important contribution to healthy youth development, these primary supports are not evenly distributed among our nation’s youth. The NELS study found that 83 percent of young people in the highest socioeconomic status (SES) group participated in at least one structured Out-of-school activity, compared to only 60 percent of young people in the lowest-SES group. Littell and Wynn found that youth in the high-SES suburban community case study were much more likely than young people in their low-SES inner-city community to participate in more than one activity. (Littell, 1989)

This pattern of participation does not reflect a lack of appreciation of primary supports. Quite the contrary, Medrich and Marzke (1991) found that 75 percent of mothers of all backgrounds in Oakland, California agreed that organized activities are a very important part of their children’s education, and in fact low-income families were more likely to agree with that statement than high-income families. (Medrich, 1991) Other research has suggested that primary supports programs are particularly valued by minority children. A Harris poll commissioned by the Girl Scouts found that, although 81 percent of participants surveyed said that Girl Scouting was at least somewhat important to them, 60 percent of African American girls and only 33 percent of Caucasian girls said it was very important. (Brown, 1990)

The Safe Havens study further suggests that once children from economically disadvantaged families access primary services, they use them just as frequently as children from advantaged families. (Gambone, 1997) Despite this high value placed on these activities among less-well-off-families, when it comes to the practice of actively seeking Out such programs for their children and facilitating their participation, better-educated parents and those with higher incomes were more likely to seek them out for their children and to facilitate their children’s participation. (Medrich, 1991)

It appears that the limited participation of lower-SES families in primary supports programs is at least partly a function of access. In fact, Wynn and Littell, in their comparison study of a high-SES suburban community and a low-SES urban community, found that for every 1,000 youth in the suburban community, there were seventy-one available activities a week—compared to approximately twenty-three comparable activities offered in the inner-city community. The situation with community facilities was even more disparate—with nine for every 1,000 children in the inner-city community compared to forty-one for those in the suburban community. Public schools in the suburban community offered almost seven times as many extracurricular activities as their inner-city counterparts.

Equally striking was the limited variety of programs for youth in the inner-city community. Sports in the inner city largely meant basketball; in the suburban community, sports included a wide range of options—swimming, tennis, gymnastics, karate, golf, racquetball, and soccer. Other options in the inner city included church choirs or other church youth groups, and tutoring and prevention programs. Both the Medrich and the Wynn and Littell studies point out that most programs in the inner city are provided at low cost or no cost to participants, which tends to result in programs aimed at the common denominator—in effect, activities of interest to ‘most" young people. Such an approach does not offer young people in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods nearly as much opportunity to discover and explore their interests and talents as their advantaged counterparts.

In light of the growing evidence of the potential usefulness of primary supports in enhancing youth development, it is important to expand our understanding of these programs and to explore their value to the youth and families they serve. Given the evidence that such programs are highly valued in lower-income communities, despite lower levels of participation, it appears particularly important to increase our knowledge about how programs that are reported to meaningfully serve young people from low-income communities conceive their mission and surmount the challenges they confront.

In the next chapter, we will explore the commonalities that emerged in our interviews with directors of the seventy-seven programs included in our study in order to highlight those characteristics shared by programs that are among the best of their kind, as these are purported to be. We also will explore how directors themselves think about the benefits of their programs and how they have begun to attempt to document or measure them. Then, grouping the programs into substantive categories, we will describe them in more detail and discuss how differences in program goals may be related to differences in strategies underlying programming.

Merry, Sheila M. (2000) Beyond Home and School: The Role of Primary Supports in Youth Development. Chicago: Chapin Hall Center for Children

’ You can read the Introduction: Describing Primary Supports on this site.
  The full report is downloadable in PDF format at http://www.chapin.uchicago.edu/