Assessing youth’s perspectives on risk and protective factors of resilience - YRAT

• In Event: Buidling Youth Agency through Participatory MEL Methods in LAC

Proposal

The Colombia Youth Resilience Activity (CRYA) set out to strengthen resilience in youth historically affected by Colombia’s internal armed conflict. Despite a marked decrease in homicide rates, the Colombian youth demographic continues to grapple with challenges stemming from interpersonal and familial violence, educational attrition, substance dependency, joblessness, homelessness, and involuntary displacement. The interventions orchestrated by CRYA are strategically designed to alleviate these adversities by empowering youth to cultivate safeguarded environments, amplify economic prospects, and foster augmented social cohesion. These pursuits unfold through a comprehensive array of services and initiatives extended across approximately 30 municipalities, which are situated among those most significantly afflicted by criminality and violence.

The CRYA offers individualized programs to strengthen the resilience of participating youth. To establish a baseline after which individualized programs will be designed, the CRYA developed the Youth Resilience Assessment Tool (YRAT) to measure self-reported resilience with the purpose of identifying the attitudes and behaviors that influence resilience in youth participating in the program. To guide the development of the individualized programs, the CRYA developed a criterion-referenced interpretational framework 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.
The tool is designed to be administered when the youth is enrolled in the program, and after successful completion of it. As of July 2023, a first cohort of approximately 5,000 participants completed the program. To measure the impact of the intervention, the CRYA will analyze the intake and output data to determine which protective factors have the most influence in youth resilience, which protective factors are directly correlated with youth participating or not in delinquent behavior, and comparison between different sociodemographic groups of participating youth (e.g. indigenous vs non-indigenous, migrants vs non-migrant, school attendance vs dropouts, type of intervention) via the computation of Cohen’s D to determine the practical significance of the intervention.
Additionally, the CRYA will report on the percentage of youth in each of the Resilience Levels, including the percentage of youth who effectively increased their resilience. To provide deeper insight about what attitudes and behaviors were modified by the intervention, the program will also prepare reports describing the attitudes and behaviors exhibited by youth at the start of the program and contrast them with the expected attitudes and behaviors at the completion of the program. The explanation of these modified behaviors identified through the YRAT will be complemented with findings derived from the analysis of qualitative data collected during exit interviews.
The implementation of the YRAT in the first cohort shed important information to guide the improvement of the tool. Based on lessons learned and feedback from implementers and participants, an improved version of the tool has been developed to be administered on a second cohort of participants who will start the program in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Author

• Mauricio E. Estrada Matute, American Institutes for Research