The Research For Relationship Between Extracurricular Activities Paticipation And Positive Youth Development

Theories and researches have confirmed that extracurricular activities which are abundant in content and types are a piece of fertile soil to promote positive youth development. These activities occupied most of adolescents’leisure time. But there were some weaknesses in the past researches:the investigation of activities were not comprehensive; the activity types were not clear; It is uncomprehensive for the behavior, the activities’ environment and emotional factors.Untill 2004, King et a.l developed the questionnaire of" The Children’s Assessment of Participation and Enjoyment and Preferences for Activity of Children "(for short CAPE/PAC) can effectively solve the above problem.It can assess multiple dimensions and comprehensive types of youth extracurricular activities participation,and then we can deeply explore the relationship between multiple dimensions of participation, the structured or unstructured activities,ecological activity patterns and positive youth development. According to the above, this research will study from three aspects:First study, revising CAPE/PAC according to Chinese cultural background. First, we investigated the common activities of China youth usually participation through semi-open questionnaire survey of 162 students and 50 parents from multiple regions across the country, and combined with expert group evaluation opinion to determine activity items of the first Chinese version of CAPE/PAC, The structure of the questionnaire is determined by a preliminary survey of 282 fifth grade to eighth grade students from Changchun and Dalian and a formal survey of 567 fifth grade to eleventh grade students from Changchun and Dalian.Second study, survey the present status of Chinese youth extracurricular activities participation by the Chinese version of CAPE/PAC. Subjects are 567 fifth grade to eleventh grade students from Changchun and Dalian.Third study, explore the relationship between different dimensions of extracurricular activities participation and positive youth development, and analyze whether there is difference between structured and unstructured activities in this relationship; further dividing different activity patterns through person-oriented analyses and exploring whether there is different positive youth development level when youth participate in different activity patterns. Positve Youth Development Questionnaire to measure positve youth development.Subjects are 475 fifth grade to eighth grade students from Changchun and Dalian.The results are as follows:(1) The CAPE/PAC of Chinese version that is revised has a good reliability.(2) Adolescents participation in extracurricular activities have differences in activity types, Social Activities, Physical Activities and Recreational activities are all high in preference; Recreational activities and Self-Improvement Activities are both high in intensity; Recreational activities, Social Activities and Physical Activities are high in enjoyment; The preference, intensity, enjoyment of Skill-based activities all are at the lowest level. At the same time, the preference, intensity, enjoyment of the unstructured activities all are higher than the structured activities, but the environment characteristic of stuctured activities are better than unstructured activities.(3)Females are better than males in the overall status of extracurricular activities participation.On the characteristics of grade development, the activity preference tends to be stable. The breadth and intensity of active participation both showed the trend of increasing firstly and then decreasing; the enjoyment showed the trend of increasing.(4)The better of extracurricular activities participation in various dimentions, the higher of the positive youth development level. The relationship between the active preference and the intensity of active participation and the positive youth development is more closely. And preference had greater predictive power for positive youth development than intensity.(5) The level of positive youth development had significant difference on four activity patterns, Broad pattern is higher than the other three patterns, Low pattern is lower than the other three patterns, and the overall level of Skill pattern and Social pattern is nearly same for the positive youth development.