The effect of positive youth development intervention program on the development assets of high school students

The main purpose of the study is to examine the effect of positive youth development intervention program on the developmental assets of high school students and the permanence of this effect. In addition to this main purpose, it is aimed to adapt the Developmental Assets Profile to Turkish for measuring the developmental assets of high school students. For these purposes, a two-stage research has been designed. While the adaptation studies of the Developmental Assets Profile were carried out in the first stage, the intervention program developed in the second stage was implemented. The method of the study was determined as a qualitative supported quantitative research method in accordance with the aims and a weak experimental design with a single group of pretest-posttest was used. Different working groups were determined for each stage of the research. During the scale adaptation stage, data were collected from 91 high school students for linguistic equivalence analysis, 504 for validity analysis and 124 for reliability analysis. In the second stage, the experimental group formed for the intervention program applied face-to-face and online consists of 13 high school students, 1 of which is a disabled student. In Developmental Assets Profile adaptation process, Life Skills Scale was used for criterion validity. Also, Personal Information Form, Developmental Assets Profile, Online Session Evaluation Form and General Evaluation Form were used as data collection tools in the studies regarding the intervention program. A 12-session intervention program was applied to the experimental group, 3 sessions face-to-face and 9 sessions online. In the analysis of the data, Pearson correlation coefficient, confirmatory factor analysis and Cronbach alpha internal consistency coefficient methods for scale adaptation studies; To test the effectiveness of the intervention program, Wilcoxon signed ranks test was used for quantitative data and content analysis technique was used for qualitative data. As a result of the analysis, the psychometric properties of the Developmental Assets Profile revealed that the Turkish form is a measurement tool that can be used to measure the developmental assets of high school students. As a result of the analyzes conducted in order to test the effect of the intervention program implemented, it was concluded that the developed and implemented program was effective in increasing the developmental assets of high school students and this effect was permanent. Qualitative analysis also supports this result.