Trust Formation in Youth-Adult Relationships in Out-of-School Time Organizations

• In Event: Building Trust, Sharing Power: The Promises and Challenges of Youth-Adult Partnerships in Out-of-School Time Programs

Abstract

Objectives

Trust is foundational to many youth-adult relationships, including youth-adult partnerships (Hammond, 2014; Rhodes, 2005; Taft & Gordon, 2018). This paper describes a model for trust-growth in youth programs that will spark conversation on the role of trust in youth-adult partnerships.

Theoretical Framework

Trust is indispensable to authentic collaboration within youth-adult partnerships. Zeldin and colleagues’ (2012) theoretical framework on youth-adult partnerships includes two components that call for a nuanced understanding of how trust develops: natural mentoring relationships and authentic decision-making. When collaborating, partners have opportunities to support each other’s work in ways that can set in motion trust-growth as depicted by the model. Since authentic partnership involves adults recognizing, valuing, and validating youth’s involvement in meaningful decision-making (Zeldin, Christens, & Powers, 2012), it is likely that youth regularly assess whether adults are engaging in actions showing they want to be equal partners. When youth note such actions, trust may grow and lead to active engagement, opening up opportunities for intergenerational communication (ibid).

Methods & Data Sources

We used constructivist grounded theory to analyze interviews with 108 youth participants and 25 adult staff in a study of 13 project-based youth programs serving adolescents in Chicago, Central Illinois, and Minneapolis-St.Paul. Interviewers asked youth whether they trusted an adult in the program and, if so, how that trust formed and impacted them. Interviewers asked adult staff how they built trust. We engaged in an iterative process of analyses including: open and focused coding; memoing; constant comparison; and creating categories (Charmaz, 2006). Finally, we generated a process model to represent trust formation in youth programs by connecting extant literature on interpersonal trust (Mayer et al., 1995; Rotenberg, 2010) to our research findings (citations blinded for review).

Findings & Significance

Our Proposed Model of Trust Formation in Youth Program Contexts (See Figure 1) represents contextual factors shaping trust: program structure, time, and the approaches adults use to build trust. The white boxes from left to right represent youth participants’ experiences, beginning with an initial and temporary level of trust in an adult. We propose that youth’s trust develops by the following sequence: an adult engages in an action that is meaningful to the youth; the youth makes a positive assessment of the adult based on that action; and this assessment increases (or decreases) youth’s trust. Increases in trust lead to youth acting in a way that indicates they trust the adult (e.g., asking for help) and enhancing youth’s experience in the program (e.g., increased motivation). The model depicts a feedback loop illustrating how these outcomes present opportunities for subsequent actions by the adult that youth then assess. Trust grows when this feedback loop repeats with an accumulation of transactions assessed positively by youth.

The sustained and significant amount of time youth and adults contribute to a youth-adult partnership can foster a feedback loop of transactions influencing youth’s trust in adults and adults’ trust in youth. We encourage partners to ask: where are the spaces for trust-growth transactions to intentionally occur in youth-adult partnerships?

Author

• Aisha Griffith, University of Illinois at Chicago