National 4-H Council

With increasing interest in the role of spirituality in youth development, and recent findings linking it to positive development, the authors investigated contextual factors that are potentially linked to youths' perceived spirituality. Using parent–child data from the 4‐H Study of Positive Youth Development, they took a social ecological approach to investigate the links between family and community factors and youths' self‐ratings of spirituality; specifically, they tested whether family factors mediated the relationship between community factors and youths' perceived spirituality. The results indicated that the presence of positive caring adults in a given community was positively related to youths' spirituality, and this link was partially mediated by family religious experience across different conceptions of spirituality. Although these findings have implications for how parents and practitioners engage youth to develop and nurture their spiritual lives, future studies will need more diverse samples and investigate more specific contextual processes that undergird youth spiritual development.

Within Extension, environmental scans are most commonly used to assess community or organizational issues or for strategic planning purposes. However, Extension has expanded the use of environmental scans to systematically identify “what programs exist” on a given topic or focus area. Yet, despite recent attention to the topic of environmental scanning in Extension, survey instruments used to conduct environmental scans have not been published. Given the emphasis on implementation of evidence-based practices and programs, having a ready-made survey that can be used to identify programs on a specific topic and that could subsequently lead to an evaluability assessment of those programs would be a useful resource. To encourage the use of environmental scans to identify existing evidence-based programs, this article describes a survey instrument developed for the purpose of scanning for 4-H Healthy Living programs ready for rigorous outcome evaluation and/or national replication. It focuses on the rationale for survey items, as well as provides a summary and definition of those items. The survey tool can be easily adapted for future programmatic environmental scans both within and outside Extension.