Youth-adult partnerships are collaborations between adults and youth in the
decision-making and planning processes. When adults enable youth to be a part of the
decision-making and planning processes, youth voice, empowerment, and participation
become important tools for facilitating engagement. Better understanding these processes
can be beneficial for practitioners and programmers. Incorporating these tools increases
support and opportunity for youth developmental benefits and increases program retention
rates.
This thesis focuses on better understanding the relationship between youth voice,
empowerment, and participation and critical factors in developing youth engagement and
utilizing the power of adult-youth partnerships in youth development. A preliminary
model of Systematic Degree of Engagement specifying the relationship between youth
voice, empowerment, and participation has been developed and discussed.
One of the key issues in developing the model has been that existing literature has
rarely made distinctions between voice, empowerment, and participation. The terms have
been used interchangeably and, when distinctions have been made, overlaps between the terms have not been fully explored. Therefore, this thesis built on existing literature by
defining distinctions among these constructs. After distinctions between concepts were
made a model was derived: Systematic Degree of Engagement.
From this research, program designers are able to develop programs and assess
existing programs that foster youth engagement. Researchers benefit from this thesis in
understanding the distinctions in voice, empowerment, participation, and engagement. The
findings of this thesis are the distinctions in terminology of voice, empowerment,
participation, and engagement; as well as, a model illustrating these terms independence
and inter-relatedness.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2830 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Maynard, Karen Kimberly |
| Contributors | Witt, Peter |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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