Assessing the Ecological Assets in the After-School Activity Space for Promoting Positive Youth Development

Shu-Chen Wang, National Academy for Educational Research

Adolescents’ growth is heavily influenced by their experience in their daily routine activity spaces, according to the human ecological theory. Research on the impact of adolescents spending time in outside structured settings is still limited. This study utilizes the social process approach as a conceptual framework to design scales to identify ecological assets existing in the routine after-school activities space for adolescents and to examine the association with positive youth development. Data was gathered in 2022 in Taiwan, focusing on seventh-grade students. Sixty-three participants documented their daily after-school activities and assessed developmental assets for each activity area they stayed, distinguishing between weekdays and weekends. This study employed network analysis to illustrate geographical relationships and to compare the network structures of urban and rural areas. Further, a bootstrapping regression model was applied to examine the association with youth positive development. The study finding indicates that adolescents exposed to activity spaces with ecological assets such as supportive and supervisory environments are significantly positively associated with their positive development after controlling for gender, indigenous identity, and father's education level. This study echoes the applicability of the positive development theoretical framework in Chinese-cultural-based society and presents contributions in both theory and practice.

Keywords: Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Neighbourhood/contextual effect analysis, Data visualisation , Spatial Demography

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