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Program Design for Youth

Program design for youth is the means of structuring, implementing and evaluating social services that help facilitate the physical, emotional, psychological, social and intellectual development of young individuals and communities . The purpose of program design is to create the most effective and inclusive youth programming to emphasize the developmental needs described above. Most programming today incorporates positive youth development as a main tenet of practice. Depending upon the program goals – prevention, intervention or both, crafting youth programs involves creating a targeted age range, usually somewhere over ten and under twenty-five. Developing programs involves deciding on who will implement the program, who will benefit and who will evaluate the perceived benefits. Ultimately, effective program designs demonstrate comprehensiveness, creativity, and youth empowerment.

Positive Youth Development

With roots in the 1990s, positive youth development brought a more nuanced focus on youth for policymakers, social workers and a variety of other professions . Before positive youth development frameworks, scientific studies of adolescents and policies emphasized a deficit model: “the predominant conceptual frame for the study of this age period has been one of storm and stress or as an ontogenetic time of normative developmental disturbance…a predominant emphasis in the youth development field continued to be a reliance…on defining PYD as the absence of adolescent behavior problems” . PYD attempts to acknowledge that youth development needs to be defined by more complex criteria than whether a young person is having sex, doing drugs or performing other socially-described risky behaviors.

PYD consists of the five Cs of youth development: competence, confidence, connection, character and compassion. Competence refers to the level of mastery a young adult feels about four aspects of one’s life: social, academic, cognitive and vocational. Confidence basically means self-esteem and self-value, while connection answers this question: does a young person have healthy interactions with peers, adults and family members? Character, in some ways, aligns with the deficit model and looks at how youth come to understand social rules and right and wrong actions. Compassion relates to feelings of empathy and sympathy toward others . If all five are in place in a young adult, a sixth C, contribution, emerges: “a young person enacts behaviors indicative of the Five Cs by contributing positively to self, family, community, and, ultimately, civil society .

Establishing Goals

When designing youth programming, it is critical to first establish attainable goals for the program. In determining these goals, program designers should address logistical concerns such as the purpose of the program and who the program intends to serve. More specifically, establishing goals also addresses why the program is needed and the means by which the program will better the specified population it will serve. In doing this, effective program designs include specific and measurable goals.

Program goals should chiefly serve as guiding objectives that bridge the mission and purpose of a program to its measurable results. Ideally, establishing goals allows the program designer to frame the effectiveness of a program as a product of the overall program design.

In relation to all of this, programs involve four main components of inputs, throughputs, outputs and outcomes . Inputs can be defined as the “agency’s resources and raw materials: (1) clients or consumers, (2) staff, (3) material resources, (4) facilities, and (5) equipment” . This relates to the goals in so far as your inputs determine who you intend to help (such as low-income families or the aging population) and how you intend to improve the situation (provide physical resources like food and clothing or residential facilities). The inputs are frequently determined by a needs assessment to better understand social problems and issues affecting a particular group or community. Throughputs represent the steps and procedures for carrying out the program goals. This relates to what kinds of services the program will offer, service tasks and measures taken to provide services and style of intervention, whether enabling, teaching or facilitating . Outputs then refer to “the direct products of the program activities,” meaning, how much aid was received, how are services defined as “complete,” and how is quality of service determined . Outcomes are the qualitative and quantitative measures to determine an increase in quality of life at the end of the program . This has four main components:

• numeric counts, or measurable client contacts and exits from the program
• standardized measures related to evaluation
• level-of-functioning scales, or scales to determine an increase of functioning in client populations after the program
• client satisfaction .

This all relates to the creation of a program hypothesis, which directly relates to establishing goals for a given program.

Effectiveness

In determining the effectiveness of the program, designers should be aware that successful programming tends to excel in one of the following five areas: “(a) extraordinary large benefits per dollar of cost…(b) unusually convincing evidence that the program delivers substantial benefits, regardless of cost…(c) convincing evidence of long-term effects…(d) evidence of cost-effectiveness on a national scale…(e) new hope of making progress to solve a seemingly intractable social problem” .

One can utilize thirteen criteria when addressing and evaluating whether a program would be deemed successful:

• statistically significant effects on the treatment group
• effect size (more than a twenty percent change)
• cost-benefit
• length of time for effects to last
• quality of evaluation (how credible was the process of evaluating program success)
• relationship between evaluator/program (evaluator should be an independent person/organization)
• replication (can the changes be replicated by another organization)
• comparison to other existing programs
• uniqueness of the program (be aware of the unique approaches of a program that might make it more successful than others)
• effect size and intensity of participation in the program
• faithfulness of the replication to the original program design
• effect size and site experience (how long has this particular program been in effect in a particular area)
• scale and scope of the replication of the program (the program should be implemented in a setting similar to the original treatment group size) .

To provide an example of “successful” program design for youth, Treatment Foster Care (TFC) programs have been replicated, proven to lower the incarceration rates of youth and offer lower costs with greater results than traditional group care programs: “TFC placed eighty delinquent boys between the ages of twelve and seventeen into foster families recruited from the community…the average age of the boys was 14.3…and their mean number of arrests prior to beginning treatment was thirteen. The program trained the foster parents in…behavior management skills and monitored them closely” . After one year, TFC programs had fifty percent lower rates of arrest than control groups and cost twenty-nine percent less than most group care programs. Because this program meets several of the criteria and standards described above, in most cases, one would call it a successfully designed program, despite its flaws (the population was small and the program designers performed their own evaluation) . No program will be one-hundred percent effective, but these guidelines offer some insight into considerations for successful programming.

Population, Size and Scope

Addressing the population demographics that a program is intended to serve is a critical step in program design. In specifying a target population group that the program is geared towards, the program designer should address why this population has been selected over other populations and how and why this group would benefit from the implementation of the programming. Building off of the selection of a population group, the program design should also determine the size and scope of the planned programming.

For effectiveness, establishing the scope is also an important step in program designs. This process involves determining the range to which services will be provided. For instance, some youth programs are locally based in communities, while others provide services at a national level. There are even some youth service agencies that address needs through an international approach. Additionally, designs can also have a multi-faceted approach, providing various services or providing for multiple population groups through the same programming. Given this, deciding the scope for a program design will vary from organization to organization.

When designing programming, scope is often based on logistic figures such as the size of the organization, the availability of resources, size and needs of target population group. Adding to that, program scope is also influenced by the existence and availability of other programs of similar nature. Lastly, scope is also shaped by the overall goals intended for the programming and mission of the organization.

For instance, in a program designed to address dating violence among Mexican American adolescents, focus groups revealed the need “to design the program to explore important cultural values in a way that allowed for diverse experiences. Specifically, youth recommended attending to diversity across faiths…to deliver the program in both English and Spanish and to allow…differences in US and Mexican dating and sexual norms” . The population, in this case Mexican American youth, must be consulted in the program design and designers should acknowledge cultural strengths and insights.

Accessibility

Accessibility to the programming site or resources has a significant role in how well the program will be received by the target population and therefore the overall effectiveness of its efforts. With this in mind, effective programs are designed in ways that take accessibility needs and concerns into account before actual implementation. Designers, for example, should address whether or not the program’s prospective clients will have to travel in order to the benefits of their programming. Going off of this, in the event that many clients will have to travel, designers determine if the benefits of the programming will exceed the traveling time and expenses. If traveling to receive the benefits of the programming is determined to be unreasonable or ineffective, designers may look to other means of reaching target populations, such as providing clients with resources that are closer in proximity to them or transportation services.

When discussing accessibility needs, designers also take into account other possible obstacles that may prevent clients from receiving the benefits of services. The availability of clients poses the greatest barrier between clients and the benefits of the services being provided. Scheduling conflicts can arise between the programming and activities such as schooling, extracurriculars, or employment. Consequently, program designs attempt to minimize conflict issues by taking into account the accessibility needs of their target population.

Evaluation

Programs need to be designed with clear evaluation processes in mind. Essentially, program evaluation uses various social science techniques to show the effectiveness and outcomes of a particular program . Evaluation and effectiveness overlap: evaluations are most effective when performed by a third party, unbiased from the original design .