Critical Issues in Adolescent Participation in Out-of-School Time Activities
Harvard Family Research Project
One key issue for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers interested in out-of-school time (OST) is youth participation rates.
Practitioners, for example, want to know how to attract and sustain participation to maximize the potential benefits to those participating.
With scarce resources, policy makers need to know what youth face the greatest barriers to participation and in what activities are at-risk youth least likely to participate so that policy intervention may be appropriately targeted.
From a research perspective, empirical questions aboutOST participation are moving toward examinations of youth within their developmental context, with a focus on how characteristics of youth, their families, and their communities may be interdependent in determining who does and who does not participate in OST opportunities.
Second, we examined the potential mediating effects of neighborhood affluence and safety for associations between family socioeconomics and OST participation.
Our aim in this second set of analyses was to determine whether family characteristics were indirectly related to OST participation as a function of the neighborhoods that families live within.
In other words, is there evidence consistent with a chain of events whereby: parent education and family income are important selection factors in determining neighborhood residence and, in turn, the conditions of these neighborhoods into which families select are then predictive of OST participation?
OST Activities were regressed on family income, parent education, neighborhood affluence, and neighborhood safety using maximumlikelihood logit estimation.
In light of these results, interventions aimed at increasing participation in OST activities by disadvantaged youth may be most likely to succeed if both family-level and neighborhood-level needs are addressed.
