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Early adolescents often hear messages like "Don't spend too much time on your phone!" Yet little is known about how middle school youth regulate their smartphone usage. To help fill that gap, the authors held a week-long summer workshop to explore early adolescents' perspectives on positive and healthy social media usage. A community-based participatory action research model was used to design a social media curriculum around one specific middle school community, beginning by gathering perspectives from students, parents, and staff. This work shaped a workshop curriculum, which was piloted in summer 2019 with 13 students from this middle school. The workshop activities engaged participants in reflecting on their social media habits, using a method called photovoice to empower participants to share the world through their lenses. In the process, they developed interest in becoming producers as well as critical consumers of social media. The long-term goal is to incorporate these participants' voices into a user-centered design process to build an app, website, or workshop to support healthy social media use. The photovoice project provides an example of how to engage in a research-community collaboration to learn which social media and well-being issues are most salient in a school community. It is also a model to show afterschool or summer program providers how to conduct their own photovoice workshop.

Purpose: This study aims to introduce the concept of communities of social media practice where more experienced users provide guidance to female novice users, enacting a form of legitimate peripheral participation to "onboard" newcomers. Design/methodology/approach: Through surveys with 968 early adolescents (average age was 13), the authors quantitatively explored sources and types of guidance for young social media users, popularity of conversation themes related to this guidance and how these conversations are associated with positive social media engagement. The authors qualitatively documented a case study of how a summer workshop of 17 students promotes positive social media use through a community of practice. Findings: Although early adolescent girls reported that they more frequently talked to their parents about a wider range of social media topics, same-age peers and younger family members (e.g., siblings, cousins) were also frequent sources. Surprisingly, the authors also found that the source most strongly associated with positive social media use was the peer group. This case study of an intentional community of practice demonstrated how peers go from "peripheral" to "centered" in socializing each other for more positive social media use. Originality/value: Unlike most prior scholarship on mediating social technology use, this study focuses on a critical developmental period (e.g. early adolescents), sources of guidance other than exclusively parents, explore the specific conversation topics that offer guidance and document an informal community of practice for girls that provides the training ground for peers and adult facilitators to codesign more positive social media spaces.

Out-of-school time (OST) youth programs are inherently difficult to assess. They are often very dynamic: Many youth interact with one another and with staff members in various physical environments. Despite the challenge, measuring quality is critical to help program directors and policy makers identify where to improve and how to support those improvements. This article describes recent research on the Assessment of Program Practices Tool (APT), establishing its strength as an evaluation and tracking tool for OST programs. The validation was conducted in two phases. The first phase was designed to evaluate the scientific rigor of the tool. Based on the findings from the first phase, the second aimed to inform improvements in the tool and its training. The testing so far shows that online video-based training needs to be more specialized in order to improve rating reliability for high-stakes users, such as third-party evaluators.

The process of establishing a healthy male identity can be difficult for many boys. The limited definitions of masculinity available to boys and men are generally characterized by competition, repression of fear and emotion, and physical and emotional strength. Boys of color and those of lower economic status tend to encounter even fewer healthy alternatives for defining their maleness than do their white and better-off counterparts. Boys who need support in choosing positive and healthy pathways could benefit from an intervention that gives them space and time to share information, to work and play cooperatively, and to grow healthy identities. While inclusive grouping is an important part of building community in a youth development program, common-interest groups such as girls' or boys' empowerment groups can help members grow and support one another. In this article, the authors describe the results of a case study they conducted of one such group, an afterschool empowerment group for middle school boys. Using elements of ethnographic study, the authors examined participants' reactions to the work they did together in the empowerment group and explored the characteristics that made the group leaders effective in facilitating that work. The authors' goal was to discover how a boys' empowerment group could help participants avoid risky behaviors such as joining a gang or engaging in interpersonal violence, while instead making healthier choices that could lead to positive growth. Their findings on the benefits of participation in a boys' empowerment group suggest that these steps are valuable and worthwhile. Boys in the empowerment group they studied lived daily in a delicate balance between safety and harm across a host of domains--physical, emotional, social, academic. The authors saw some of them experience dramatic changes in their attitudes toward school and relationships. When a boys' empowerment group is done right--and has the right leadership--it can change lives.

Background: School-based comprehensive sex education programs can reduce early adolescents' risky sexual behavior. The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a 3-year comprehensive sex education program in delaying vaginal sex for middle school students and whether the family component of the intervention contributes to its effectiveness. Methods: This longitudinal evaluation followed a cohort of 6th graders (N?=?2453) through the end of 8th grade. The design used random assignment of 24 schools into treatment and comparison conditions. The analysis included multiple-group logistic regression to assess differences in delay of sex between intervention and comparison groups. Results: In schools where the program was taught, 16% fewer boys and 15% fewer girls had had sex by the end of 8th grade compared to boys and girls at comparison schools. Completing family activities during the first year of the program predicted delayed sexual debut for boys. Conclusions: Theory-based, developmentally appropriate, comprehensive sex education programs that include parent involvement can be effective in delaying vaginal sex for middle school students. Parent involvement is particularly important for boys, as family activities may encourage parents to talk with their sons earlier and more frequently.

Background: Early sexual activity can undermine adolescents' future school success and health outcomes. The purpose of this study was to assess the role of a family homework component of a comprehensive sex education intervention in delaying sexual initiation for early adolescents and to explore what social and contextual factors prevent adolescents from completing these family homework activities. Methods: This mixed methods study included 6th-and 7th-grade survey responses from 706 students at 11 middle school schools receiving a sex education intervention, as well as interviews from a subset of 33, 7th-grade students from the larger sample. Results: Adolescents who completed more family homework assignments were less likely to have vaginal intercourse in 7th grade than those who completed fewer assignments, after controlling for self-reports of having had vaginal intercourse in 6th grade and demographic variables. Participants' explanations for not completing assignments included personal, curriculum, and family-based reasons. Conclusions: Family homework activities designed to increase family communication about sexual issues can delay sex among early adolescents and contribute to school-based sex education programs. Successful sex education programs must identify and address barriers to family homework completion.

Background: This study fills a gap in the literature by examining how school staff members view bullying and sexual harassment and their role in preventing both. Given recent legislation, increasingly more attention is paid to bully prevention; however, student-on-student sexual harassment is less addressed. Methods: Four focus groups were conducted with 32 staff members from 4 midwestern public middle schools. Questions assessed professional development opportunities on bullying and sexual harassment prevention/intervention, personal definitions of these behaviors, and their perceptions of school norms regarding such behavior. Results: Staff members recalled receiving more professional development on bullying than sexual harassment. They tended to define sexual harassment as something that occurs between adults and/or adults and students and did perceive their role in enforcing a "sexual harassment-free" peer-to-peer school zone. Conclusion: When school administrators fail to provide professional development on both bullying and sexual harassment, staff members do not understand that sexual harassment occurs between students. Thus, they are unaware of policies to protect students from harmful experiences in educational settings and are not likely to understand their own role in preventing them. (Contains 1 table.)

Positive youth development has been extensively documented in contexts such as the family, school, and afterschool. Emerging theory and research indicate that digital contexts such as social media may also be venues through which young people develop skills and attributes associated with the 5 Cs model of positive youth development and thriving. This research attempted to understand if and how middle school youth's in-person and online networks connect, and if they do connect, do these connections relate to engaging in beliefs and behaviors associated with PYD. Results suggest that in this sample, middle school youth include peers from afterschool in their online networks, and those who have friends from afterschool and school engaged in PYD- related social media behaviors at higher rates than those who were not connected to in-person networks. No association was found between the amount of time spent in after-school contexts and any of the positive or problematic social media outcomes in this study. Implications for youth development professionals considering the influence of social media on youth, and next steps for research on after-school activities and social media use of middle school youth are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]