Adolescents' civic engagement is related to other aspects of their positive development. Many family and school characteristics can promote adolescents' civic engagement, but they are often studied separately. Furthermore, studies have often used adolescent self-reports and measured only one aspect of the multidimensional construct of civic…

Feelings of acceptance within school communities can promote positive psychological outcomes. Despite occurring outside of the classroom, youth who engage in extracurricular activities typically report greater school belonging. Accordingly, we examined the longitudinal effect of extracurricular activities on school belonging and depressed mood in…

This study explored whether Latinx adolescents' ethnic identity and stressful experiences predicted characteristics of their naturally-occurring mentoring relationships with non-parental adults. Ninth-grade Latinx students completed surveys about ethnic identity, stress exposure, and their natural mentoring relationships during 9th and 10th grade.…

Organized sports are among the most common youth activities in the United States, and athletic coaches can often become important mentors to their players. Nonetheless, few studies have examined the characteristics of youth who form mentoring relationships with coaches and whether such relationships are associated with later academic outcomes.…

Overweight youth are often socially marginalized and have fewer friends than their nonoverweight peers. Participation in organized activities may be one way to promote friendships for overweight youth. In this study, we used a large nationally representative sample to test whether two aspects of participation promoted friendships, namely the…

Granger models are popular when it comes to testing hypotheses that relate series of measures causally to each other. In this article, we propose a taxonomy of Granger causality models. The taxonomy results from crossing the four variables Order of Lag, Type of (Contemporaneous) Effect, Direction of Effect, and Segment of Dependent Series…

A person-oriented approach examined the extent to which patterns of school readiness across social and cognitive domains in 944 typically-developing 54-month-old children forecast academic achievement, social-emotional development, risk taking, and executive functioning at age 15. Prior work identified six distinct profiles of school readiness at…

Youth mentoring can have a profound impact on the lives of high-risk youth. This study presents the Campus Corps program, a time-limited (12-week), structured mentoring program for high-risk youth (ages 11--18), and results from a quasi-experimental pilot evaluation. Baseline and post-intervention problem behavior data from 315 offending youth…

This article contributes new evidence on the associations among immigrant generation, gender, and sexual risk behavior among Latino adolescents in the United States. Longitudinal data from 3,272 Latino adolescents (grades 7-12) who participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) were examined for evidence of the…

Civic engagement was studied in relation to overall development in adolescence, emerging adulthood, and young adulthood to examine how earlier activity involvement and success in prior and concurrent age-salient domains of competence may contribute to 2 forms of civic engagement in adulthood (citizenship and volunteering). Data on 163 youth were…

This study examined how various components of school engagement contribute to the academic performance of African American adolescents. The sample consisted of 499 African American adolescents in Grades 9 to 11. We investigated how adolescents' gender, grade, cognitive functioning, and parental education affect their school engagement and whether…

This study applied individual growth trajectory analyses and person-oriented analysis to identify common profiles of out-of-school activity engagement trajectories among racially and ethnically diverse inner city teens (N = 1,430). On average, teens exhibited declining trajectories of participation in school-based and team sports activities and…

This longitudinal study examines the effects of exposure to the terrorist attack of September 11th as well as exposure to other forms of community violence on change in the mental health and social attitudes of youths in New York City. Three quarters of the youths reported some form of direct exposure to the events of September 11th, and 80%…