Aligning Youth Development Theory, Measurement, and Practice Across Cultures and Contexts: Lessons from Use of the Developmental Assets Profile

The development of youth has implications across all sectors of societies, and thus, holistic approaches to promoting positive youth development that take an across-sectors perspective may be more effective and cost-efficient ways of investing in youth. The current interest in collective impact to improve outcomes for young people intersects with growing interest in a diverse array of social-emotional, non-cognitive, or “soft” attitudes and skills that are increasingly recognized as being foundational for multiple educational, workforce, and livelihoods outcomes. But these “intangible” factors are difficult to measure well, particularly when compared to observable behaviors or testable knowledge and skills. This challenge is exacerbated in lower and middle-income countries where there is limited research, and there are even fewer consistent, validated measures that examine personal strengths—particularly ones that are consistently contextualized and tested across cultural and language differences. For the past decade, Search Institute and several partners have utilized a broad measure of positive youth development, the Developmental Assets Profile (DAP), in a series of studies in a wide range of international agencies, countries, languages, and program contexts. This paper draws on 50 datasets from 31 countries, involving more than 25,000 young people, ages 9–31, to more comprehensively describe the strengths and issues involved in using the DAP for measurement of child well-being across cultures and language groups. In the process, it reports on the link between crosscutting elements of well-being and critical international development priorities across sectors. The longevity and breadth of this ongoing effort offers insights and lessons for more recent efforts to develop, operationalize, and validate practice-focused measures across multiple contexts and languages. It serves as a case study in the challenges and opportunities of developing and utilizing shared measures across multiple countries, cultures, and language groups.