Abstract
There is a growing body of international research which shows that social and emotional skills development programs lead to positive outcomes on a range of educational, health, social and behavioral outcomes for young people. However, the evidence is less well developed outside of the US and there is, therefore, a need to determine how well these programs can be implemented and scaled up in other countries and policy contexts. This review provides a narrative synthesis of the evidence on the effectiveness of community-based interventions for enhancing young people’s social and emotional skills in the UK. A range of electronic databases were searched and responses to a call for evidence to youth organizations were analysed. A total of 14 intervention studies employing experimental designs that were conducted in the UK in the period from 2004 to 2016 fulfilled the criteria and were selected for full review. Seven of the studies evaluated the impact of youth social action interventions, five focused on mentoring programs and two on community arts and sports interventions. Six of the intervention studies were conducted within the last 2 years, primarily with young people living in deprived communities, and five studies employed randomized control trials. The results indicate that there is a small number of robust evaluation studies that provide evidence of the impact of social action trials (N = 4) and mentoring programs (N = 2) on enhancing young people’s social and emotional skills, community engagement and reducing behavioral problems. However, none of the studies were rated as strong and eight studies received a weak quality rating indicating poor quality evidence of intervention effectiveness. The current evidence base needs to be strengthened to determine the effectiveness of community-based youth programs, including which intervention approaches are most effective, and their long-term impact and sustainability.
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Notes
A global rating of Strong is indicated where there are no weak ratings on any of the six component ratings; moderate when there is one weak rating, and weak when there are two or more weak ratings.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge funding for the original 2014 unpublished review that was provided by the Early Intervention Foundation, the Cabinet Office and the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission in the UK. We are grateful to study authors and organizations that supplied us with additional information on the interventions and their evaluation. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors.
Author Contributions
MB and AC conceived the original review and devised the protocol. AC and SM conducted the systematic review searches and data abstraction and AC, SM and CAF undertook the original review assessment. AC and SM undertook the updated review and search processes in 2016 and AC and SM undertook the independent quality assessments. MB conducted a further quality assessment to ensure consistency. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript and the table of evidence. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Funding
Funding for the original review in 2014 was provided by the Early Intervention Foundation, the Cabinet Office and the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission in the UK.
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Barry, M.M., Clarke, A.M., Morreale, S.E. et al. A Review of the Evidence on the Effects of Community-based Programs on Young People’s Social and Emotional Skills Development. Adolescent Res Rev 3, 13–27 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40894-017-0055-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40894-017-0055-2