For teens growing up in military-connected families, challenges relating to relocation, parental deployment, and reintegration add layers of stress to an already complex time of life. Out-of-school time programs provide military-connected teens opportunities to utilize existing strengths, develop new skills, and build support networks, as…

Like many youth development programs, most youth mentoring programs do not have prescribed practices that target specific outcomes. Because the construct of mentoring represents a broad range of potential activities, researchers face a conundrum when making generalizable causal inferences about the effects of this and similar services. On the one…

Youth who form bonds with supportive, nonparent adults within their existing social networks (i.e., natural mentors) experience a range of positive outcomes, but a relatively minimal amount is known regarding the psychosocial factors that prospectively predict the formation of natural mentoring relationships. Analyzing longitudinal youth data from…

Whether discussing the process involved in positive youth development (PYD), articulating an approach (or philosophy) of youth programs associated with PYD, or enacting a program aimed at promoting PYD, ideas derived from relational developmental systems (RDS) metatheory are pertinent. Accordingly, we discuss the RDS metamodel and explain the…

Advances in theories of adolescent development and positive youth development have greatly increased our understanding of how programs and practices with adolescents can impede or enhance their development. In this article the authors reflect on the progress in research on youth development programs in the last two decades, since possibly the…

Youth development lost a pioneer and a champion, Peter Benson, in October. Benson was a pioneer whose ideas mattered and a champion of approaches to research and its use in the community that has made a difference around the world. Benson's work, life, and spirit have helped transform people's understanding of young people, what it takes to…

Borrowing the term "translational research" (TR) from medicine, along with some of the ideas and practices that define it, holds promise as a way of linking research more closely to the practice of youth development. However, doing so entails substantial adaptation. TR is more than a new name for applied research. It comprehends the…

This article calls for research on the expertise of youth development practitioners. We argue for studies focused on understanding youth practice from practitioners' points of view--as they experience and enact it--with the aim of contributing findings and frameworks that are helpful to their work and learning. To improve youth programs, first, it…

In order to examine youth experiences in athletic activities with different characteristics, the present study explored the developmental outcomes associated with participation in three different types of sport (individual sports, team sports, and dance-type sports) as well as across six identified patterns of participation (no participation,…

Through secondary data analysis of a nationally representative sample, the study explored the relations between adolescent summer arrangements and associated developmental outcomes (well-being, externalizing behavior, body mass index, and academic performance). The study also examined if these relations were mediated by parental knowledge of youth…