Surveying adolescents: Focusing on positive development

Abstract

Although risk behaviours can threaten healthy youth development, reducing risks alone is not sufficient to help youth successfully negotiate adolescence. Promoting protective factors that buffer risk, such as family and school connectedness, community engagement and positive peer support, are also important for helping youth to thrive. Since 1992, the Adolescent Health Surveys conducted by McCreary Centre Society (Vancouver, British Columbia) have monitored both risk behaviours and protective factors among high school students across British Columbia. They have shown that, contrary to media images and community perceptions, the majority of young people are not exposed to risk factors such as violence and abuse; most do not have unprotected sex, drink and drive, use illegal drugs or consider suicide. They have also documented key protective factors that are linked to lower rates of risk behaviours and more positive outcomes, even for youth who face unsafe environments, family problems and other stressors. The shift toward assessing and promoting protective factors is a major paradigm change in adolescent health care, and clinicians can be an important partner with families and schools to foster healthy youth development.

Understanding Youth Violence in Kumasi: Does Community Socialization Matter? A Cross-Sectional Study

“…The country level expectation is the development of a national legislation to address youth violence. This reiterates similar calls that have been made by Saewyc and Tonkin [38].…”

“…A case in point is the earlier confirmatory findings of the positive relationship between unskilled young people (who do not get entry into the public sector) amidst high unemployment levels in the country and youth violence as reported finding supported by the Ghana Statistical Service [3]. In the opinion of Saewyc and Tonkin [38], when there are positive peer supports, it mediates the extent to which young people could become engaged in violent behavior. In a rather opposite finding, although peer support was found to exist within the catchments that our study participants dwelt in, their support was rather negative.…”

Investigating the Factors Related to Substance Use in the Iranian High School Students Using the Positive Youth Development Model

“…Drug abuse in adolescents comes along with the increase in death and injury danger via interpersonal aggression, road accidents, increase in hazardous sexual behaviors, undesired pregnancy, getting diseases like AIDS, and education problems (4). This hazardous behavior among adolescents is considered as the biggest threat to their lives (5).…”

Adolescents' perceptions of the words “health” and “happy”

“…The earliest published studies of adolescents' self-rated health suggested that how adolescents learn to perceive, interpret, and report their health affects their future health ratings and actual health behaviours (Mechanic and Hansell, 1987). Research on self-rated health among adolescents has identified several important determinants of subjective health formulations: socioeconomic conditions (Piko and Fitzpatrick, 2001;Goodman et al, 1997); overall sense of functioning (Piko and Bak, 2006;Vingilis et al, 2002), particularly social functioning (both popularity and intimacy in peer relationships) and psychosocial characteristics (Mechanic and Hansell, 1987;You et al, 2008;Rayce et al, 2008;Rathi and Rastogi, 2007); psychological well-being (Saewyc and Tonkin, 2008;Hampel and Petermann, 2006); child-parent relations (Wilkinson, 2004;Tusaie et al, 2007); academic achievement (West et al, 2004;Samdal et al, 1998);and gender (Nic Gabhainn and Kelleher, 2000;Currie et al, 2008).…”