Leadership Activities for Rural Youth

The National Future Farmers of America (FFA) Organization funded a national research project to describe and map the leadership activities of rural youth who are members of FFA. Through this project we hope to gain an understanding of leadership in action. FFA activities will be tracked into a two dimensional matrix, capturing the role young people play in leadership and the context in which the activity is performed. A questionnaire was developed for the purpose of collecting data regarding youth participation in leadership activities. Reliability and validity were established by an expert panel and field testing of a 64 item survey. Three states in each of the four national FFA regions were randomly selected. Thirty schools participated with over 1000 FFA members completing the questionnaire. Descriptive statistics will be generated for all quantitative data using SPSS. Results of this study will determine the context in which leadership activities are performed, the role of the student and teacher in identifying and implementing FFA activities, and the students\u27 perception of barriers for participation in activities