Making Every Day Count - Teens

Club Participation and Teens’ Outcomes 31SummaryIn addressing the question “What role do the Boys& Girls Clubs play in influencing change in teens’outcomes?” we used quantitative data from the baselineand final surveys and Club daily attendancerecords to analyze the extent to which various levelsof attendance at Clubs are related to changes in31 outcomes, spread across the three broad Clubdesignatedareas: good character and citizenship,academic success and healthy lifestyles.Results across the areas assessed indicate a positivepicture. Teens who had higher levels of participationin the Clubs showed greater positive changeover the course of the 30-month evaluation (fromthe baseline survey in Winter 2006 to the finalsurvey in Spring 2008). On average, youth whoattended the Clubs at least 122 to 244 days duringthat period appeared to be more likely toshow positive changes on the outcomes of interest,compared with participants who attended less frequently.The qualitative data bolster these findingsby providing insights from youth and staff about thepractices and strategies that support the influenceof the Club, as a whole, on youth in each of theseoutcome areas. Interviewed staff and teens spokeabout the importance of the Club environment, thesafe place it provides and the role of interactionswith supportive adults and peers as crucial—and, intheir view, more important than programming—inhelping promote teens’ positive development. TheClubs also serve as a stable, familiar environmentfor teens, a role that may be particularly crucial asthey transition to new schools and have to adjust toa new set of teachers, coaches and other adults intheir school lives. The youth in this study who wentto the Clubs with more frequency tended to showimprovements in many of the areas in which teenstypically decline as they transition from middle tohigh school.In the next chapter, we summarize the key findingsfrom the evaluation and offer lessons from thesefindings for Clubs and the broader field of practitioners,researchers and funders interested in supportingpositive opportunities for teens during theirout-of-school time.