Developing a Paradigm Model of Youth Leadership Development and Community Engagement: A Grounded Theory

Abstract

This grounded theory study explored the impact of community engagement on how youth leaders develop. A paradigm model illustrating this developmental process is presented, which includes the conditions that empowered the youth to engage in their community, the strategies used by the youth and the adults in their work together, the conditions that helped/hindered those strategies, and the resulting outcomes. Results of the analysis indicated that individual connections, common sentiments, and being asked to engage were identified as the most salient causal conditions. The action taken by the youth and adult respondents mobilized those individual connections and common sentiments into social capital, which was then converted into individual and community outcomes.

Changing Leaders, Leading Change: A Leadership Development Model for Marginalized Youth in Urban Communities

“…45 Dempster & Lizzio, 2007. 46 MacNeil, 2006, p. 28. 47 Haber (2011) identifies the following qualities of this emergent leadership perspective:…”

Untitled

“…According to Hogan and Kaiser (2005), youth "leadership is one of the most important topics in the human sciences and historically one of the more poorly understood" (p. 169). Research has been conducted quantitatively (Antonakis, Avolio, & Sivasubramaniam, 2003;Chan & Drasgow, 2001;Guerin et al, 2011;Oakland, Falkenberg, & Oakland, 1996;Ogurlu & Emir, 2013;Schneider, Ehrhart, & Ehrhart, 1999;Zacharatos, Barling, & Kelloway, 2002) and qualitatively (Close & Lechman, 1997;Ferguson, Kim, & McCoy, 2011;Haber, 2011;Hammond-Diedrich & Walsh, 2006;Hastings, Barrett, Barbuto, & Bell, 2011;Komives, Mainella, Longerbeam, Osteen, & Owen, 2006;Mortensen et al, 2014;Mullen & Tuten, 2004;Roach et al, 1999;Webster & Worrell, 2008;Zenkov, Harmon, Bell, Ewaida, & Lynch., 2011). These diverse explorations on youth leadership and its development revealed that adolescent leaders are motivated, socially and culturally competent, self-directed, responsible, compassionate, and community-oriented.…”

Creating Community Capacity through Youth Empowerment: A Case Study of Rural Nicaragua

“…Creating spaces, such as the 4-S clubs, in which young people can be engaged in their communities, express their creativity, and feel empowered, is an important, but often overlooked, piece of community development (Hastings, Barrett, Barbuto, & Bell, 2011). The young people who participated in our study have already engaged in different activities in their communities and they have received a lot of support from the adults.…”