Enhancing Their Likelihood for a Positive Future: The Perspective of Inner-City Youth

Abstract

Inner-city youth must overcome many environmental challenges as they strive for success. Their outcome is influenced by the interplay of protective forces and risk factors.

Objective. To learn directly from youth what solutions they believe would most influence their likelihood of achieving a positive future.

Design. In-school 8th-, 9th-, and 12th-graders in north Philadelphia generated, prioritized, and explained their own solutions through a 4-stage hierarchical process facilitated by AmeriCorps workers. In Stage 1, 60 randomly selected students participated in 8 focus groups to develop the study question. In Stage 2, youth in Nominal Group Technique sessions generated and prioritized solutions. In Stage 3, a survey for each grade that included their top prioritized ideas was distributed, and youth rated each idea on a Likert scale (5= Definitely would make me more likely to have a positive future to 1 = Would definitely not…). One thousand twenty-two ninth-graders (69% of in-school youth at 5 high schools) returned usable surveys. Ninety-three percent of responders were 14 to 16 years old, 44% were male, 54% were black, and 32% were Latino. Four hundred seventeen 8th-graders and 322 12th-graders returned usable surveys. In Stage 4, youth in 10 focus groups added meaning and context to the ideas.

Results. The highest rated items in all grades were solutions that promoted education or increased job opportunities. Ninth-graders ranked helping youth get into college first by the Marginal Homogeneity Test. The creation of more jobs was ranked second. Third rank was shared by more job training, keeping youth from dropping out of school, and better books for schools. The next tier of items focused mostly on opportunities for youth to spend their free time productively and to have interactions with adults. Many items calling for the reduction of risk behaviors or disruptive surroundings were rated lower. The Kruskal-Wallis test found little variation in rating of the ideas by gender, race, or socioeconomic status.

Conclusions. Youth believe that supportive solutions would do more to enhance their likelihood of reaching a positive future than would attempts to reduce “negative” behaviors or disruptive surroundings. This suggests that research and policies should consider how best to augment the protective influences of education, employment, meaningful use of time, and connection to adults.