Page 30 - Ana Kozina and Nora Wiium, eds. ▪︎ Positive Youth Development in Contexts. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2021. Digital Library, Dissertationes (Scientific Monographs), 42.
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positive youth development in contexts

to the non-significant influence of gender in the multivariate analysis is
implied in the Norwegian Public Reports (Norges offentlige utredninger,
2019) that showed that parents’ educational background had a greater effect
on children’s school performance than gender. As for age, the observation
that younger participants reported more of the assets and thriving indica-
tors than older participants has been consistently reported in prior studies
(Benson et al., 1998; Scales et al., 2000; Wiium, 2017). One possible explana-
tion for this age difference may be due to the positive correlations between
age, maturity and independence such that, due to their maturity and search
for independence, older youth may not have access to or find some assets as
relevant compared to younger youth.

Limitations of the Study
The present study has some limitations that are worth mentioning. The
data used in our study were cross-sectional, which implies we are unable
to assess the developmental trajectories of the assets, and thus also unable
to tell the variation or stability that may occur over time. In addition, we
could not establish causation concerning the association between the as-
sets and thriving, even though the theoretical argument that the assets fa-
cilitate thriving is supported by several empirical studies. Nonetheless, in
future research, longitudinal studies could be carried out to address some
of these limitations.
Another limitation is that the questionnaire we used was developed
with American samples and might therefore not adequately capture all the
resources and opportunities available to young people in Norway. For ex-
ample, to measure constructive use of time, one item was whether youth
went to a church or a mosque for at least 1 hour per week. This question
might be less relevant for Norwegian youth because over the years Norway
has become a secular country with ever fewer religious inhabitants, where-
as worship services have seen a reduction since the beginning of the cen-
tury (Statistics Norway, 2016). In addition, the low Cronbach’s alpha of the
composite variable thriving may indicate that thriving among Norwegian
youth was not sufficiently assessed by some of the items that were studied.
It is also possible that the young people’s responses were affected by so-
cial desirability bias, whereby they tended to over-report more desirable
developmental assets and thriving indicators. These limitations could be
addressed in future studies by using qualitative methods to probe into the

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