Changes in the Participants in a Community-Based Positive Youth Development Program in Hong Kong: Objective Outcome Evaluation Using a One-Group Pretest-Posttest Design

Abstract

Project BP.A.T.H.S.^has been shown to be effective in promoting positive development outcomes among Chinese adolescents in the school context. However, little is known whether the benefits can also be found in other settings. The purposes of the study was to investigate the changes in psychosocial outcomes among Hong Kong Chinese adolescents after participating in a community-based positive youth development (PYD) program. Using a one-group pretest-posttest design, junior high school students (N = 17,544) were invited to join the universal prevention program (the Tier 1 Program) and/or the selective prevention program (the Tier 2 Program). 10,807 students whose pre-and post-test data were successfully matched. The students responded to validated outcome measures assessing PYD outcomes, life satisfaction and thriving at pretest and posttest. Consistent with the hypotheses, students showed positive change on different developmental outcomes after joining the program. Amongst the different programs, students in the Tier 2 Program had significant improvement in all developmental outcome indicators. While limitations of the one-group pretest-posttest design and the alternative explanations are duly acknowledged, the present study suggests that the community-based Project P.A.T.H.S. is a promising approach to promote positive youth development, life satisfaction and thriving of adolescents, a conclusion which is consistent with the existing evaluation findings of the project. Building from previous school-based research, the present study extends the literature by showing the effectiveness of a positive youth prevention program in a community context. Limitations of the study design (e.g., an absence of a control group) are discussed.Applied Research Quality Life

Objective outcome evaluation of a leadership course utilising the positive youth development approach in Hong Kong

“…Ma, Shek, and Leung (2019) successfully replicated two previous studies (i.e. Ma, Shek, and Chen 2019) and confirmed the effectiveness of a youth program in promoting adolescents' positive youth development attributes and psychological well-being. Singer et al (2019) replicated Ray et al (2013) study and revealed that higher levels of compassion satisfaction and lower levels of compassion fatigue predicted lower rates of burnout in victim advocates.…”

“…Similar findings were revealed in Project PATHS, a positive youth development program that has been applied in Hong Kong secondary schools during the past 10 years (e.g. Ma, Shek, and Chen 2019). The research team found that adolescents in junior high schools benefit greatly from this program and displayed significant positive improvements in most of the positive youth development attributes after they participated in the positive youth development training program.…”

“…Moreover, this positive youth development program is able to contribute to the psychological well-being of adolescent participants (e.g. Ma, Shek, and Chen 2019;Ma, Shek, and Leung 2019). Researchers found that adolescents showed significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and thriving after joining this positive youth development program.…”

“…Researchers found that adolescents showed significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and thriving after joining this positive youth development program. Different evaluation strategies, including objective outcome evaluation, subjective outcome evaluation, process evaluation and qualitative evaluation, have consistently demonstrated the effectiveness and success of this positive youth development program in Chinese adolescents (Shek and Wu 2016;Ma, Shek, and Chen 2019). Positive youth development programs are popular with young people of high school age (Catalano et al 2012) but are seldom applied in emerging adulthood (Dvorsky et al 2019).…”

The Impact of Positive Youth Development Attributes and Life Satisfaction on Academic Well-Being: A Longitudinal Mediation Study

“…In the Chinese context, the Project P.A.T.H.S. has been shown to promote life satisfaction in Chinese high school students in Hong Kong ( Ma et al, 2019a,b ) and China ( Zhu and Shek, 2020 ). The development and implementation of educational and intervention programs to promote students’ PYD qualities and life satisfaction would be very meaningful for helping educators and school administrators to reduce the academic stress of students and elevate their academic satisfaction.…”