CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT IN YOUTH PROGRAMS: Lessons from Developmental Science Research and Practice

Young people develop character through engagement with a wide variety of contexts, including families, schools, and out-of-school time (OST) programs. Youth programs (structured sets of regularly occurring activities that are delivered by adults in planned, intentional ways to achieve explicit goals) are prominent settings where youth spend considerable time. Youth programs often have character development as an implicit or explicit goal. However, there is considerable lack of clarity and widespread inconsistency in how character is conceptualized and operationalized, which leads to challenges in the research and practice of character development in youth programs. In this chapter, we define character using contemporary developmental theory and argue not for a unified definition of character or the attributes which comprise it, but for clarity in the application of the term in developmental research and practice. Throughout, we explore how an overarching definition derived from developmental theory can be used to build a more comprehensive understanding of character development across the diverse approaches used by youth programs. In doing so, we argue for an approach to character development based on the specificity principle; character development should be understood in context, as should the youth programs that seek to promote it.