Use of Needs Assessments - Assignment Example

Abha Mittal 29th February 2008 Needs Assessment, Use of Needs Assessments, Influence of Modeling and Exploring Ones Own Paradigms. Needs Assessment is a tool that will help educators, policy makers and public at large to figure out what each young person can or could do well (their capabilities and capacities) and, also, what is 'needed,' that is, if there is anything missing, absent or required in a young person's life. The American public at all socio-economic levels is increasingly concerned about community problems involving youth (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1992). A number of studies have been conducted as an attempt to find the causes behind such state of affairs and provide solution to these problems. However, the dominant approach to data collection and analysis so far- learning what is wrong with young people- is fundamentally flawed as it fails to investigate the factors in a young person's life that we know lead to healthy development.1 It does not tell the full or even the correct story about our kids. There is need to explore more deeply into the factors that are instrumental in shaping the positive development of a child and more scientific work needs to be done to responsibly advance the youth development field. In general this field aims at supporting and promoting processes assumed essential for the health and well-being of a child. 1. Measuring Deficits and Assets: How We Track Youth Development Now, and How we should Track It by Gary B. MacDonald and Rafael Valdivieso Most of the studies of national importance conducted till recently , with the exception of a few like the one by America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being and Trends In the Well-Being of America's Children which incorporated some of the indicators of positive youth development, were focused towards finding out and measuring the deficit indicators in our children's lives primarily because the studies were conducted either for- measuring, analyzing or understanding and reporting on social changes or for- decision making and evaluating and assessing governmental social programs and policies. The continuation of such programs depended, of course, on data to monitor their effectiveness. How those indicators have come to be used over the past thirty years has evolved considerably. As the cost of rehabilitation programs mounted, prevention instead of treatment of social problems became the mantra to policy makers. However, there was a tricky problem to decide as to who should be included in prevention programs. Many attempts to decide on the basis of persons "at risk" or the persons with some specific precursor behavior could not give right perspective as there is no significant evidence in research to conclude as to who needed these programs the most. (can you contact me at my email address mabha2001@yahoo.com. I need to talk to you urgently.) The prevention approach or model lays emphasis on finding an effective way to prevent a given problem from happening to or among young people and is based on the principle that absence of problems means that young people are developing appropriately. From the developmental perspective, there are several flaws in this approach. First, while there are plenty of evidence that negative behaviors or conditions impede the positive development of young people, there is hardly any evidence that absence of such behaviors in itself equates with positive development as in the words of Karen Pittman, a leading youth development advocate " problem-free is not fully prepared." Moreover, it is difficult to measure behaviors that could have happened but did not happen because of a prevention input. Secondly, these prevention programs target only a fraction of our young people who are considered to be "at risk" and not all.. The development perspective offers a different approach and asks three common sense questions : What kind of human beings do we want all our children to be What skills do we want them to possess What do we want them to be able to do to succeed in adolescence as well as adulthood. The answer to these questions is that we want our children to acquire a rich array of social and intellectual knowledge, attitudes and competencies that will enable them to be sensitive, caring and responsible people. In fact, prevention and youth development are the two faces of the same coin as the most effective prevention programs are almost always developmental in nature and developmental inputs are said to be naturally preventive. The line of demarcation between them is that development is comprehensive while prevention is specific and usually target a particular period of time in a young person's life. It is unfortunate that there is little evidence of the kind of systematic enquiry necessary to guide, shape refine and fuel this approach so necessary to have a say in national policy discussions and funding. The scientific enquiry is also of paramount importance in order to learn how to increase the effectiveness of what we call the " people, places and opportunities" and their pile-up effect on youth development; of discerning how to take the effective practice to scale; of advancing the sustainability of good and effective work; and in informing the training of youth development practitioners. Another important hurdle in the advancement of the field is that there is the relative lack of people and places doing research on issues germane to youth development. It is a practical field and considered to be of secondary importance and research in child and adolescent psychology do not help us much in understanding the "people, places and opportunities" that shape lives. University-based departments underplay the real world settings we seek to mobilize which results into a missed opportunity, an underutilized resource for strengthening the youth development field. It would be advantageous to the future of youth development to alter this attitude and make this field more respectable within the academy. This way we will increase the intellectual capital to the field and at the same time entitle ourselves to be instrumental in shaping public policy and allocation of public resources. Youth development is in fact a multi-disciplinary, multi-sector terrain and overlaps with other ongoing field of enquiry in such areas as prevention, resiliency and protective factors. A comprehensive view is needed to position youth development as a dominant paradigm of thinking, action and policy. It is heartening that some of the managers of influential data resources have come to realize the importance of positive developmental outcome indicators ,considered to be too soft to be included in survey of national importance till recently, in forming a more accurate and complete understanding of our children's lives. It is suggested that in addition to national studies, communities may be involved in defining and tracking the indicators of youth development most meaningful to them. As it is difficult to have sufficient resources to measure every developmental aspect of every child's life, it is important to decide which basket of selected developmental indicators would open a meaningful window into the developmental lives of our kid. This requires a panel of national experts in youth development who could define the developmental indicators that need to be tracked. The stage has been set. Let's hope for the best. References: 1. Youth development Issues: Challenges and Directions: Measuring Deficits and Assets: How We Track Youth Development Now, and How We Should Track It by Gary B. MacDonald and Rafael Valdivieso 2. Youth Development Issues: Challenges and Directions : The Scientific Foundation of Youth Development: by Peter L. Benson and Rebecca N Saito Read More