Youth Leadership Practices, Behaviors and Development: A Case Study

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TITLE Youth Leadership Practices, Behaviors and Development: A Case Study
 
RESEARCHER Cynthia M. Williams
Master of Science, Leadership and Management
University of La Verne
Unpublished Research Paper: August 2003

OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to provide the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine with a theoretical model in which to establish and formulate their leadership curriculum goals, learning objectives and educational outcomes.

METHODOLOGY
Students in the first forum of the 2003 National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine in Los Angeles were given the opportunity to participate, and 103 volunteered (30% response rate). Each year over 9,000 high school honor students around the world attend one of 24 summer conferences. Seventy students completed the Student Leadership Practices Inventory and 33 completed the Personal Best Leadership Survey. Seventy-five percent of the participants were females, approximately 50% of the sample was Caucasian (5 % Hispanic and 15% multiracial).

KEY FINDINGS
The most frequently engaged in leadership practice was Enabling Others to Act, followed by Encouraging, Modeling, Inspiring and Challenging. Their scores, relative to the normative data base, were all in the very high range. The author suggests that this is due to the very special nature of the sample population.

The author also content analyzed the Personal Best Leadership Survey responses and categorized them into one of the five leadership practices. Fifty-four percent were grouped into Enabling, 29% into Encouraging, 14% into Modeling and 3% into Inspiring.