How adolescents come to see themselves as more responsible through participation in youth programs

This qualitative study was aimed at developing theory about the process underlying the development of responsibility grounded in accounts of youth who reported experiencing this change. A total of 108 high-school-aged (M 5 16.5) youth from 11 programs were interviewed about their experiences within the program, and 24 reported becomingmore responsible through their participation. The youth’s accounts suggested that this process was driven largely by successfully fulfilling program expectations. This process was driven by youth’s adherence to their commitments and their consideration of the consequences of their actions on others. Youth mentioned changes in responsibility most frequently in three programs, which appeared to differ from the remaining programs in having more structure and placing greater ownership and accountability on youth. Many youth programs have the objective of promot-ing the development of responsibility in their mem-bers. The mission statement of the Girl Scouts of the USA (2007), for example, includes the goal of having girls learn ‘‘the importance of personal responsibility, the value of goal-setting, the spirit of teamwork, and the thrill of accomplishment.’ ’ Themission statements of the National FFA Organization (2007) and the Boy Scouts of America (2007) identify similar develop-mental goals as major, overarching goals of their programs. In a study of 48 effective youth programs, 81 % included the development of characteristics such as responsibility in their list of major goals (Roth & Brooks-Gunn, 2003). An important task for research is to understand the process that underlies the devel-opment of responsibility, as well as the features of environments that support this process. Responsibility is typically defined as the quality of being someone who can be counted on to fulfill obligations (Winter, 1992), and self-report measures of responsibility and related dispositions have been found to be associatedwith success atwork (Barrick&amp