Enhancing Their Likelihood for a Positive Future

To the Editor.—

In their recently published companion articles, Ginsburg and colleagues^1,2 provide us with 2 outstanding glimpses, 1 quantitative and the other qualitative, into the world views of today’s inner-city youth. The authors identify the ongoing debate between the risk and resiliency paradigms about how to best promote adolescent and young adult well-being in their discussion and suggest that studies that explore macro social forces such as gender, race, and socioeconomic status perpetuate a focus on risk and draw attention away from “more easily acted on variables.” I agree that a focus on demographic predictors of risk may not lead to interventions that easily enhance youth development and may, in fact, promote a “blame the victim” mentality. However, I reject the notion that studies of larger sociostructural factors, such as socioeconomic status, engender such a focus. How we interpret the data creates that difference. I offer an alternative …