American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance - AAHPERD

 Issue: January 2006

The Impact of a Summer Day Camp on the Resiliency of Disadvantaged Youths Lawrence R. Allen, Jan Cox, & Nelson L. Cooper

Abstract:
In the past decade, human service professions such as recreation, public health, and education have been asked to increase their services and document their contribution to the people and communities they serve. The recreation profession specifically has been looked upon as a unique contributor to the positive development of youths, with emphasis on a developmental perspective in recreation programming rather than simply amusement and diversion. This repositioning also has called for a more purposeful or intentional programming strategy, by which outcomes are clearly identified, program experiences are directly developed to address the proposed outcomes, and an appropriate assessment is conducted to determine the achievement of the outcomes. This article focuses on two summer day-camp programs and addresses the difference in the development of seven resiliency skills between youths participating in an outcome-based camp and youths participating in a traditional camp.

Article category: Youth Challenges in Today's Society-Part 2