Life skills education for adolescents: A landscape analysis and empirical review

• In Event: Examining the rise of “life skills” education programming for adolescents in developing country contexts

Proposal

Drawing from a review of theoretical, methodological, and empirical literature on life skills from the fields of education, public health, psychology, economics, and international development, this paper attempts to clarify basic definitional and conceptual issues and identifies common threads in the various notions of life skills education. It addresses the questions: What are life skills, and how are they conceptualized as a component of educational quality? What bodies of evidence converge in the rise of "life skills" programming and increased interest in "life skills" among thought leaders and donors in the field of international development education? The paper identifies implications from this analysis to be addressed in research and interventions that focus on life skills, particularly for adolescent girls. The paper draws upon a landscape analysis and empirical review of the literature on life skills identifying all articles that mentioned “life skills,” adolescent, and girls in the title, with variations in the vocabulary (e.g., adolescence, girl, female). We also did a purposive search of articles that reported on empirical studies of life skills to get a broader sense of the diversity of the field.
Based on our empirical and conceptual review of the literature and program/institutional documents, we identify three discourse communities that use the term “life skills”. A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of basic values, assumptions and goals, and use communication to achieve these goals (Swales, 2009). While there is some overlap in how the three discourse communities we identify have written about life skills, the goals of each of these are somewhat distinct, and therefore the ways in which they invoke “life skills” varies. These discourse communities include what we call “prevention and protection,” which includes the fields of Public Health and Social Work. The second is a discourse community focused on labor market outcomes and draws from the discipline of Economics. Finally, the third discourse community focuses on girls’ empowerment though quality education, and draws primarily from research in Education. We describe each of these discourse communities in greater detail, as well as the areas of overlap in how they use the term life skills in their interventions and publications. We conclude by returning to the question of how life skills relates to conceptualizations of quality education, particularly from a capability approach, which explicitly links education with a social justice perspective (Tikly and Barrett, 2011; Walker, 2012).

Author

• Erin Murphy-Graham, University of California, Berkeley