A Systematic Review of Racial and Ethnic Identity Development, Social Emotional Development, and Enabling Environments Measures for County Wide Program Evaluation.

Introduction: Identifying meaningful and incremental indicators of success for community-based youth development programs is a challenge, particularly for programs that aim to support youth who are racially, culturally, ethnically and gender diverse. This project aims to evaluate the progress of youth across a county wide set of health promotion and prevention programs. In order to develop a set of measures responsive to the priorities and identified intervention targets of a vastly varied set of programs, we reviewed existing measures of Ethnic and Racial Identity Development (ERID), Social and Emotional Development (SED), and Enabling Environments (EE). We focused on measuring both promotive and protective factors, to the exclusion of risk factors, to avoid the deficit centered narratives about minoritized and marginalized youth.

Methods: Systematic review strategies were used to identify measures for the ERID and EE domains using key words from the literature. Existing reviews of measures were examined for the SED domain (Deighton, 2014; Gokiert 2014; Haggerty, et al., 2011; Halle, et al., 2016; Humphrey et al., 2011; Jenkins, et al., 2014). Our phase 1 criteria for inclusion were: 1) designed for youth ages 10-18, 2) in English, 3) used in past 20 years. Phase 2 inclusion criteria: 1) measures protective or promotive factors, 2) designed for universal use (rather than screening or diagnosis), 3) reported on psychometric properties, 4) alignment to constructs as defined by youth and program staff, and 5) logistically feasible for county wide administration largely implemented by grantee providers online.

Results: Phase 1 of our review resulted 37 measures; Phase 2 resulted in 2 ERID, 10 SED and 3 EE measures. All ERID surveys were designed for research rather than program evaluation, and the two included were the only ones applicable to youth from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds. For SED, a few themes emerged: 1) only 2 of the 10 surveys were designed as pre- post-tests (CTC & YDEKC), 2) only one was designed to measure protective factors across different programs (CTC), 3) only one survey explicitly considered cultural differences in its design (CYRM), 4) only one incorporated youth voice into the survey development (WCSD-SEC).

Conclusions: Significant limitations remain in existing measures when used for building a data system for county wide program evaluation that is attuned to the diversity of youth participants. Implications for racial disparities and a measurement agenda for building data systems that center racial equity will be discussed.