Exploring the relationship between youth assets and substance use among rural youths: An empirical process for community based prevention planning

Communities across the United States are challenged with the task of transforming youths into healthy, productive adults. Youths using alcohol, tobacco and marijuana compromise this goal. Prevention efforts by social workers and other helping professions have traditionally used a deficit reduction strategy targeting only those youths already involved in, or viewed as being at-risk for engaging in risky behaviors. An alternate strategy, positive youth development, has gone largely untapped by the social work profession. This alternate strategy requires the capacity to measure developmental youth assets. Located in the domains of community, family, school, and peer groups as well as within individuals; youths assets are theorized to assist in preventing youths in engaging in high-risk behavior such as substance use. In order to use empirical information to help guide prevention practices communities must have a way to measure youth assets, and have at their disposal localized research studies specifically addressing the relationship between developmental assets and substance use. The Youth Asset Survey (YAS) developed by the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center has the capacity to meet this need for measurement, and with it the capacity for social workers engaged as community planners to build effective strategies to address at-risk behaviors in youths. The study to be presented tests the theoretical concepts related to developmental youth assets, and provides a practice perspective on its results through a survey administered to over 2000 youths from three school districts located in a rural county in northeast Ohio.