Contact Name
Barbara Dietsch
562-985-9488

Contact Email
bdietsc@WestEd.org

by Peter C. Scales, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow
Search Institute

Once again, people working in various youth development fields are embroiled in a debate about whether risk reduction or asset-building approaches are the best ways to go about promoting positive youth development and preventing various problems such as adolescent pregnancy, substance abuse, or school failure. Those of us who have hitched ourselves to one or the other of these professional wagons have, in our enthusiasm for describing what we do and how it seems to help, also inadvertently contributed to the impression that this is a zero-sum game, that one of these approaches is a substitute for the other.

This is no more sensible a debate than trying to figure out whether we should invest in early childhood instead of adolescence. We have to do both. Similarly, a community that wants its adolescents to thrive, to be healthy, productive, caring, and even happy, needs to invest both in foundational asset-building for all youth, and in targeted risk reduction (as well as highly specialized treatment and intervention for youth who already are experiencing significant problems). They are neither contradictory approaches, nor just opposite ends of the spectrum.

Asset building includes all youth and community residents in broadly and often informally influencing youths' developmental paths. Search Institute has named 40 developmental assets that youth need, grouping them into eight categories. "External" assets are Support, Empowerment, Boundaries and Expectations, and Constructive Use of Time. These are the relationships and opportunities we provide for youth. "Internal" assets are Commitment to Learning, Positive Values, Social Competencies, and Positive Identity. These are the values, skills, and self-perceptions young people develop to regulate themselves. While not intended to represent all that young people need, those 40 assets nevertheless have strong relationships to both risk and positive behaviors, and have served as a force to mobilize hundreds of communities to do more to ensure child and adolescent well-being. Risk reduction may involve providing special formal and directed programs to a much smaller proportion of a community's youth who are at higher risk of experiencing problems. It may also involve broader collective action to lessen environmental influences ranging from efforts to ameliorate the effects of poverty, to attempts to legislatively make youths' access to substances more difficult, or make their access to reproductive health care easier.

Each strategy-asset-building and risk reduction-has an impact on the success of the other strategies. Asset-building may be seen as foundational, providing positive building blocks for success among all youth. To the extent that communities succeed in helping their youth experience a high average level of assets, youth risk behavior patterns will decrease, lessening the need for risk reduction and treatment efforts. An asset-rich community also will strengthen the effectiveness of risk reduction and treatment, because even youth at risk for or already experiencing problems will have more positive resources on which to draw than youth in communities not so asset-rich. On the other hand, if risk reduction and treatment efforts are successful, youth who experience those efforts may be more able to access and benefit from the developmental assets the community offers them.

Asset building alone is no more sufficient than risk reduction alone. Targeted approaches also are necessary: Our own data show that girls and boys, high school and middle school youth, and youth from different racial/ethnic backgrounds, have different patterns of risks and assets.

The different but complementary contributions of asset building and risk reduction mean that those working to build youths' leadership skills help support the positive impact desired from alcohol and other drug use prevention programs. Those working to enhance young people's success in school have a common agenda with those trying to help young people avoid pregnancy or HIV/AIDS. Because both risk patterns and thriving behaviors (such as school success, leadership, helping others) tend to cluster, success in one area of risk reduction or thriving breeds success in others as well. But success in reducing risks also opens the door wider for the possibility of promoting assets and positive behaviors, and vice versa. These dynamics make collaboration across all community sectors not just a nice way of thinking about community, but an essential value if we want to tap into the interlocking clustering power of both risk patterns and thriving behaviors.

Risk reduction has a longer history and is more familiar to youth development professionals than asset building as a youth development strategy, so it is important to underscore how asset building supports risk reduction. Our data show that asset building has an even stronger impact on risk reduction than it does in promoting thriving behaviors. For example, young people with 31-40 of the assets are 17 times more likely than asset-poor youth with 0-10 of the assets to avoid problem alcohol use, whereas those with 31-40 assets are 8 times more likely to succeed at school than youth with 0-10 assets. Now a factor of 8 is pretty impressive, but it is not as profound as a factor of 17. The other risk and thriving patterns show similar results.

Moreover, asset building doesn't just work for those who already have a lot going on right in their lives. Among all youth with 5 developmental deficits we measure (such as being home alone too much, and having been physically abused), almost none-5%-of the youth with 0-10 assets are risk-free, but 33% of youth with 31-40 assets avoid all 10 of the risk patterns we measure, despite also experiencing all 5 deficits.

Finally, we all need to be humble in the face of the complexity of adolescent development and our efforts to make a positive difference. Social scientists usually are able to explain no more than half-and usually a lot less-of the variation in both risk and thriving outcomes among youth. Multiple regression analyses we have recently conducted show that the Search Institute data are right in this mainstream: Youths' assets can explain, over and above demographic variables, about 10% - 40% of various risk patterns and thriving behaviors, with most of the prediction in the 20% - 30% range.

In our work, as well as the overwhelming majority of other research, whether based on risk reduction or asset-building frameworks, there is a lot more going than researchers can explain.

In part, we feel that is because there is a considerable amount of low-level interaction going on among the 40 assets, such that complex, indirect, often hidden combinations of many assets, risk and protective factors working together behind the scenes, in ways we don't always understand, are responsible for a large proportion of various outcomes.

Young people are more than the sum of the separate parts represented by various risk and protective factors and developmental assets. The only approach that will allow us to come close to understanding and nurturing the whole adolescent is one in which there is not merely a tolerance for but an embracing of both those strategies for youth development.

This article based in part on the forthcoming Search Institute book, A Fragile Foundation: Developmental Assets Among American Youth (1999, by Peter L. Benson, Peter C. Scales, and Eugene C. Roehlkepartain), and in part on a keynote speech given by Dr. Scales to the 1998 annual conference of the American School Health Association.