Adolescents’ Negative Experiences in Organized Youth Activities

By Jodi Dworkin. 2007

90 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research indicates that organized youth activities are most often a context of positive development. However, there is a smaller body of evidence suggesting that these activities are sometimes a context of negative experiences that may impede learning or lead to dropping out. To better understand negative experiences in youth activities, we conducted ten focus groups with adolescents. Youths’ descriptions provide an overview of the range of types of negative experiences they encountered, as well as how they responded to them. The most frequent types of negative experiences involved peers and peer group dynamics and aversive behavior attributed to the adult leaders of the activities. The youth described two types of responses to their negative experiences - a passive response of feeling negative emotions, and active coping, which sometimes led to learning.

Subfields: Education, Safety Research, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c52c6999ab170fbba8e3bf2d96b191215230b84a

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Citations in the corpus

Fostering Life Skills Development in High School and Community Sport: A Comparative Analysis of the Coach’s Role (2014, background): “Sport is beneficial, but it can also have harmful consequences, such as negative interactions with peers, favoritism, performance anxiety, and stress (Dworkin & Larson, 2006).”
Sport participation and positive development in older persons (2010, background): “Findings suggesting that sport may also foster negative experiences are of some concern; however, recent work [45] proposes that negative experiences such as stress can lead to positive development as adolescents learn how to overcome issues, a notion that is further explored in the next section.”
Differing profiles of developmental experiences across types of organized youth activities. (2006, background): “In addition, the YES inventories five domains of negative experiences that have been discussed in the literature and emerged from a focus group study (Dworkin & Larson, 2004).”
Understanding adolescents' positive and negative developmental experiences in sport (2009, background): “Dworkin and Larson (2007) propose that negative experiences such as stress can lead to positive development when adolescents learn how to overcome the problem (e.”