Terminology

Risk Factors

Researchers in the 1970s and 1980s focused on young people who lived in contexts that we know predict poor social and psychological outcomes, such as poverty, familial conflict, and parental mental illness. Children and adolescents reared with these and other risk factors were considered to be at heightened risk for a variety of negative health outcomes...substance use, interpersonal and self-directed violence, emotional distress, and/or school failure.

In other words, risk factors are those experiences and circumstances that limit the likelihood of successful development.

Over time, researchers have come to several understandings about risk factors:

1. Risk factors exist at multiple levels of influence - individual (eating lead, low verbal skills), familial (marital discord, large family), and environmental (social disorganization of formal and informal networks, poverty).
2. Some are fixed (parental mental illness) and others are amenable to change or alteration (doing well in school).
3. Risk factors are not static and their influence can be different in relation to a developmental phase.
4. A poor health outcome is most likely an influence of multiple risk factors, not just one. It is the interaction of each that incrementally increases risk of poor outcomes.
5. Risk factors put young people in jeopardy of a variety of negative health outcomes. In other words, suicide in the family puts young people at risk for substance use, pregnancy, violence and suicide.

Resilience

The starting point of resiliency research were adolescent populations at high risk where youth workers and researchers recognized some youth did not merely survive but thrived under quite adverse conditions. The term resilience emerged from this area of study. Resilience is the capacity to recover and maintain adaptive behavior even after insult or trauma. These are kids who do well in spite of it all.

1. It is important to understand what resilience is and is not:
2. Resilience is developmental in nature, stemming from biology and experiences in life.
3. Resilience represents an interaction between the individual and the environment; it implies resistance to threat, but it is a graded phenomenon.
4. Children who are resilient are flexible, but they are not invincible.
5. Being a resilient person does not guarantee happiness.
6. Resilience is not a trait that some have and others do not.
7. Cumulative risk can defeat the most resilient individual.

Protective Factors

With the strong interest in kids who were resilient, research and practice questions began to focus on the identification of protective factors: the circumstances, the experiences, the factors that buffer young people from involvement in behaviors and outcomes damaging to themselves and/or to others.

Protective factors are those factors that moderate the effects of individual vulnerabilities or environmental hazards.

Like risk factors, protective factors:

1. Emanate from the complex interplay of environmental processes (such as school or community groups or institutions), familial processes (such as parent characteristics or behavior), self-system processes (such as competence and social responsibility), and individual characteristics (such as self beliefs and cognitive abilities).
2. Like risk factors, they exist at multiple levels (individual, family, school, community).
3. May operate in different ways at different stages of development.
4. They often, but do not necessarily yield resilience.

Youth Development

Running parallel to the work on risk and protective factors was research tha led to an understanding that young people have a set of underlying needs--beyond biology--that, if met, will increase the possibility they will grow into caring, competent adults. This understanding, articulated as a "youth development" theory or concept, is gaining currency across the country.

Perhaps the best articulation of these underlying needs was developed in 1973 by Dr. Gisela Konopka, who was asked by the former federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare to write a position paper on the requirements of healthy adolescent development. Dr. Konopka's work remains relevant today.

Dr. Konopka's asserts that youth need to:

1. Participate as citizens, as members of a household, as workers, and as responsible members of society;
2. Gain experience in decision making;
3. Interact with peers, and acquire a sense of belonging;
4. Reflect on self in relation to others, and discover self by looking outward as well as inward;
5. Discuss conflicting values and formulate one's own value system;
6. Experiment with one's own identity, with relationships; try out various roles without having to commit oneself irrevocably;
7. Develop a feeling of accountability in the context of a relationship among equals;
8. Cultivate a capacity to enjoy life.

Best Practices

Strategies, practices, frameworks or approaches that have been proven effective. "Evidence-based" practice or "science-based" practice are interchangeable terms for best practices.

Promising Strategies

Strategies, practices, frameworks or approaches that appear to be effective, but where the research is not sufficient to declare a best practice. The term, "best bets," has been coined to capture the concept of promising strategies.