Researchers have learned a great deal in the past several decades about elements in human experience that have long-term, positive consequences for young people. Factors such as family dynamics, support from community adults, school effectiveness, peer influence, values development, and social skills have all been identified as contributing to healthy development. However, these different areas of study are typically disconnected from each other.
The framework of Developmental Assets steps back to look at the whole—to pull many pieces together into a comprehensive vision of what young people need to thrive. In addition to roots in the scientific research on adolescent development, the assets grow out of three types of applied research:
- “Positive youth development,” which highlights core processes and dynamics in human development that are foundational for growing up healthy.
- Read a summary of the theories of positive youth development: Positive Youth Development So Far: Core Hypotheses and Their Implications for Policy and Practice
- Prevention, which focuses on protective factors that inhibit high-risk behaviors such as substance abuse, violence, sexual intercourse, and dropping out of school.
- Resiliency, which identifies factors that increase young people’s ability to rebound in the face of adversity, from poverty to drug-abusing parents to dangerous neighborhoods.
Since 1989, Search Institute has conducted numerous studies of 6th- to 12th-grade students in public and private schools across the United States using a survey titled Search Institute Profiles of Student Life: Attitudes and Behaviors.
The Developmental Assets framework and terminology was first introduced in 1990 through a Search Institute report titled “The Troubled Journey: A Portrait of 6th–12th Grade Youth.” At that time, the survey identified and measured 30 Developmental Assets.
We continued to review the research, as well as conduct our own studies, cumulatively surveying more than 350,000 6th- to 12th-graders in more than 600 communities between 1990 and 1995 to learn about the Developmental Assets they experienced, the risks they took, the deficits they had to overcome, and the ways they thrived.
We also conducted numerous informal discussions and focus groups, in particular to better understand the developmental realities of youth of color and youth in distressed communities. As a result of all those ongoing research activities, in 1996 we revised the Developmental Assets framework into its current form, a framework of 40 Developmental Assets.
The first large-scale dataset documenting the 40-asset framework came from over 99,000 6th- to 12th-graders in the 1996–1997 academic year. In 2001, Search Institute updated the dataset using surveys administered during the 1999–2000 academic school year. The main difference between the 1999–2000 and the 1996–1997 datasets was that the 1999–2000 dataset was weighted to adjust for over- and underrepresentation of youth, in particular minority youth and youth living in urban settings.
The current dataset that describes the state of Developmental Assets among U. S. adolescents comes from more than 148,000 6th- to 12th-graders in more than 200 communities across the United States. Surveys were conducted during 2003. This dataset was weighted to adjust for underrepresentation of groups of youth (minority and urban) by using the 2000 U. S. Census data for community size and for race/ethnicity. Weighting is an acceptable statistical procedure often used by researchers, which adjusts the values of responses for certain groups. Simply, this technique corrects for over- and underrepresentation of certain groups. Like the previous two datasets, this current dataset was drawn from individual communities that chose to survey their own students, and is consequently not nationally representative.
