Developing a practical and useful tool to measure youth resilience

• In Event: Monitoring and Measuring Youth Resilience for improved programing: A case in Colombia

Proposal

Tools are not generic, they are designed for specific purposes in specific contexts. However, if the context changes or if a program changes their objectives or wants to address other problems not initially included then a tool needs to be adjusted. The CRYA set out to improve youth resiliency and in turn it monitors youths’ resiliency. The team created a tool to meet the specific needs and context of the activity. The Youth Resilience Assessment Tool (YRAT) was developed to measure self-reported resilience with the purpose of identifying the attitudes and behaviors that influence resilience in youth participating in the program. Over the course of a year the team embarked on an innovative approach that pulled in global and local experts, youth and a variety of local actors, to develop the tool. The purpose of the panel is to present the development of the tool and demonstrate how it can be beneficial in similar contexts.
Literature review. The review focused on identifying the determinants of resilience by reviewing empirical studies on factors that impact youth resilience to keep the development of the tool aligned with the Positive Youth Development framework. The review also included a screening of existing tools such as the Youth Assessment & Screening Instrument and the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth, however such tools usually do not make references to deviant behavior or any violence, and are not developed for programmatic purposes.
In the case of Colombia, a key challenge for youth is violence. It is imperative that the measurement explain resilience as a function of protecting youth from engaging in violent behavior. Some existing tools tend to assess risk/resilience at the community level primarily for substance abuse, however, the program needed a tool that could explain risk of violent/criminal behavior, not only drugs. Other tools exist to identify risk of violence, mostly designed to assess risk of recidivism (example: the RNA tools) do not assess protective factors that would be important for resilience, for example, having a sense of humor, faith or religious experiences, and/or a positive outlook.
Contextualization. After identifying predominant risk and protective factors, discussions were led with experts representing a number of local institutions who work with youth to discuss the framework for the local context and the program’s objectives.
Validation & Pilot. Once the framework was approved with the desired factors, the team validated the items with youth based focus groups. Once the tool was adjusted, a pilot was conducted consisting of a total of 125 youth aged 10-14 and 576 youth aged 15-29 from 28 municipalities. The team then led psychometric analyses to identify the best-performing items to finalize the tool.
Standard Setting & Cut Scores. The team conducted a workshop to establish the interpretational framework of the YRAT, where local experts defined four resilience levels with general and specific descriptors for each resilience level, and the minimum score required to be classified within each level by means of the modified Angoff standard setting method.

Author

• Mauricio E. Estrada Matute, American Institutes for Research