Empowering Marginalized Youth: A Self-Transformative Intervention for Promoting Positive Youth Development

This article reports the results of a positive youth development (PYD) intervention for adolescents in alternative high schools (209 African American and Hispanic American adolescents, aged 14-18; 118 females and 91 males). The intervention was guided by a self-transformative model of PYD (Eichas, Meca, Montgomery, & Kurtines, 2014). This model proposes that the actions youth take to define themselves function as active ingredients in positive development over the life course. Consistent with the self-transformative model, results provided support for direct or mediated intervention effects on the self-transformative processes of self-construction and self-discovery, life goal development, identity synthesis, and internalizing problems. The findings illustrate the utility of using a self-transformative approach to PYD in work with marginalized youth populations. The title for this Special Section is Positive Youth Development in Diverse and Global Contexts, edited by Emilie Phillips Smith, Anne C. Petersen, and Patrick Leman