Describes Individual Development Accounts (IDA), a federal program that combines low-income individuals' savings with matching funds for such goals as home ownership, education, and small business startup. Discusses their effect on community building and how extension educators can participate in establishing IDA programs. (SK)

Considers how to develop students' passion for language and how to get them to stop and look at word choice. Defines a "gem" as a word, phrase, or sentence that is particularly remarkable or moving. Describes working with students to notice the gems, design gem journals, write their own gems, and to create future gems. (SC)

Proposes an ecological approach to enhance our understanding of how personal, interpersonal, and sociocultural factors contribute to the increased risk for suicide among adolescents. The ecological approach allows exploration of how adolescent suicide is determined by multiple factors related to the adolescent's personal history or ontogenic…

Presents a new approach that extends conventional random coefficient growth models to incorporate a categorical latent trajectory variable representing latent classes or mixtures. Provides a didactic example of this new methodology using adolescent alcohol use data and discusses the method as a tool for mapping hypotheses of development onto…

Examines the Worry Survey (adapted from the Adolescent Health Survey) as regards the developmental concerns of urban African American youths (N=495). Results show that internal consistency of the factor-item ratings on the Personal and Family Worry subscales were acceptable. Less evidence of the reliability was noted among the Peer and…

A survey of 157 older adult volunteers suggests that volunteering provides substantial benefits such as maintaining a sense of identity and self-esteem, meeting the need to belong to a group, and affording opportunities to undertake new learning challenges. Volunteer organizations should attempt to meet these needs as a way to retain volunteers.…

Discusses the use of religion in the lives of adolescents to repair problematic or disrupted attachments in the context of attachment theory and Kohut's self-psychology particularly in reference to the self-object. Proposes that adolescents do not seek to break ties with parents or adults so much as to revise their relationships in a more adult…

In this study, college students (N=127) were interviewed, given the Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status, and asked to keep 7-day diaries about their prayer activities, whether spontaneous or formal. A relationship was found between identity status and frequency of praying, as well as between identity status and commitment to religion.…

This article analyzes an essay by Joseph Renzulli reviewing his work on gifted models by using the career of Renzulli himself as a case study of the components of creative, productive giftedness. It finds that creatively gifted individuals must face challenges that are formalized in the Sternberg and Lubart investment theory of creativity.…

Introduces wisdom as a fundamental quality of the effective multicultural counselor. Wisdom is defined, discussed, and differentiated from intelligence. Implications for counselor education and practice are discussed. Maintains that wisdom may provide a new paradigm with the potential to bring the field to a higher plateau of effectiveness in…

If vocational psychology is to realize its potential as a developmental science, it must speak authoritatively on substantive questions of vocational development and integrate research findings with those of other fields. This will contribute to the larger framework of life-span human development. (Contains 36 references.) (Author/SK)

A comparative longitudinal approach to acculturation follows immigrant children from different generations across time, isolating the effects of acculturation from normal developmental shifts. Acculturation can also be examined in terms of level and developmental progression across different aspects of adjustment. (Contains 40 references.) (SK)

Despite its widely acknowledged importance to effective therapeutic practice across theoretical orientations, it has been suggested that counsellor "personal development" remains a poorly defined area of training, and that the concept is itself endowed with numerous implicit meanings. In an attempt to move towards a more explicit and…

Loss of hearing seriously affects individual development. Especially, a profound loss of hearing has effects in the evolution of a child's verbal language. Keeping in mind the level of the loss of hearing, a specific educational and recovering methodology has been adopted: on one hand, the stimulation of the hearing potential and the achieving of…

A study uses a developmental model to know the decision-making ability of coaches during sports competitions.