Positive youth development interventions: Advancing evaluation theory and practice

Abstract

Efforts to promote effective youth development have been a focus for research for over 25 years. During that time the relation between setting-based programming mostly from within the youth development field and formalized procedural programs mostly from within the prevention field have been offered with intermittent attempts to cross-over and integrate. This special issue provides a set of articles from a conference intended to promote such integration while advancing methodological and conceptual thinking for intervention studies. The articles comprising it provide frameworks for advancing such understanding, identifying important areas of potential or realized integration, and suggesting important issues for further consideration toward achieving valid and informative intervention research in effective youth development.