Count Them In: A Quantitative Investigation into the Relationship and Differences Between Minority Youth Leadership Capacity and School Factors

This quantitative study investigated the leadership capacity of minority youth. The research used a sample population of 322 ninth and tenth grade urban school students, in a medium sized secondary school in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. The participants completed the Youth Leadership Questionnaire, an 18 item self-report instrument that measured leadership capacity in relation to Self-concept, Self-efficacy, and Emotional Intelligence. After totaling each of the composite scores of the Youth Leadership Questionnaire, Independent t-tests and a Spearman correlation were run to determine relationships and differences between minority youth leadership capacity (based on the YLQ) and gender, achievement, attendance, grade, extracurricular activities, and socioeconomic status. The study revealed that no relationship existed between the YLQ scores of ninth and tenth grade minority urban school students and school dependent variables, which were achievement, gender, extracurricular activities, attendance, grade, and socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the study revealed there were no differences between ninth and tenth grade minority urban school students YLQ scores as related to the variables of gender, achievement level, school attendance, grade level, participation in extracurricular activities, and socioeconomic status as measured by the three variables in the YLQ. The findings indicated that all youth have leadership capacity as determined by the Youth Leadership Questionnaire three domains: self-concept, emotional intelligence, and self- efficacy. The lowest score, scored on the YLQ in this study was 60 and the highest scored was 124