Is There Inequality in What Adolescents Can Give as Well as Receive?

School environments

Well-known inequalities in educational resources include notable differences in opportunities for adolescents to make contributions in their schools. Underresourced middle and high schools face challenges in engaging in teaching practices that incorporate active student involvement, cooperative learning, and participation in decision-making (Slavin, 1995). Many schools try. But large classrooms, teacher turnover, and rigid curriculum mandates can prevent schools from consistently offering youths the active participation in the learning process that is known to prevent the declines in motivation and achievement triggered by the transition from primary to secondary school (Eccles et al., 1993). These nonparticipatory contexts are more prevalent in schools disproportionately attended by youths from low socioeconomic, ethnic-minority, and immigrant backgrounds (Wigfield et al., 2015).

Outside of the classroom, extracurricular activities and specialized electives offer adolescents the opportunity to contribute to a group and help other people attain a shared goal (Vandell, Larson, Mahoney, & Watts, 2015). The relative inability of poorly resourced schools to fund extracurricular activities is exacerbated by the use of parent- and community-funded booster clubs to support such activities in wealthier communities (Vandell et al., 2015). School size presents an additional challenge. Although larger schools may offer a greater variety of activities, high enrollment in many schools translates into fewer potential slots per student for sports, clubs, and leadership (Crosnoe & Benner, 2015). The limited resources and larger sizes of the schools attended by poorer youths and those from ethnic-minority and immigrant backgrounds means that they often have significantly less involvement in a variety of activities (Laughlin, 2014).

Community settings

Outside of school, communities may offer adolescents the opportunity to participate in organizations focused on making an impact and to volunteer in charitable and social-service activities. The availability of community opportunities for contribution, however, is limited. Only about half of American high school students report participating in such organizations (Laughlin, 2014). The nationwide lack of community opportunities becomes most apparent in areas that experience less economic investment, stability, and social capital. Thus, disparities in community participation are similar to those in schools—youths from Latino and immigrant backgrounds are significantly less likely to be involved in such activities (Simpkins, 2015; Vandell et al., 2015). The same is true for youths from poorer families and those living in low-income areas. Male youths are often less likely to participate than females. These inequalities are exacerbated by the fact that even when they do exist, few communities have the resources and expertise to provide key elements of a successful youth program. These elements include “opportunities to be efficacious, to do things that make a real difference and to play an active role in the organizations themselves” (Eccles & Gootman, 2002, p. 117).

Employment represents another form of contribution to the community. In addition to providing a source of income, employment may meet adolescents’ need to contribute—helping to achieve a shared goal, creating a sense of agency—if it includes age-appropriate demands that do not interfere with schooling and health. Again, disparities exist. Youths from ethnic-minority backgrounds show higher rates of unemployment than their European American peers (Child Trends, 2018). When adolescents do obtain work, the jobs held by many African American and Latino youths tend to be of low quality and unlikely to provide experiences that engender a sense of contribution.

Family and peer relationships

Families can provide adolescents with the opportunity to make contributions in a variety of ways, from the seemingly mundane to the more consequential. Relatedly, offering youths the opportunity to participate in decision-making about their lives allows for the sense that they are contributing to formation of family rules and norms. The challenges faced by many economically distressed, ethnic-minority, and immigrant families can make such an approach difficult to achieve. Concerns about safety can lead to understandably higher levels of parental control, and irregular work schedules or family stress make it difficult to provide the amount of time and support necessary for deliberative, shared decision-making processes (Furstenberg, Cook, Eccles, Elder, & Sameroff, 1999).

Nevertheless, youths from many lower-income, ethnic-minority, and immigrant families develop a strong sense of contribution by playing significant instrumental roles in their families. These adolescents are significantly more likely to have a sense of obligation to support their families, whether through daily tasks (e.g., chores, sibling care) or providing financial support (Fuligni & Telzer, 2012). The same is true for adolescents from low-resource families. The sense of agency, meaning, and purpose provided by this sense of obligation to the family provides a powerful motivation for many youths to seek advanced education and a stable future (Fuligni & Tseng, 2000).

Instrumental support to the family can be a double-edged sword, however. High levels of family obligation and financial support can interfere with the ability to succeed in high school and complete postsecondary education (Fuligni & Pedersen, 2002; Tseng, 2004). Within high-conflict or economically distressed families, taking on significant duties can create stress and lead to risky behaviors and substance use (Telzer, Gonzales, & Fuligni, 2014; Telzer, Gonzales, Tsai, & Fuligni, 2015). The situation facing these youths highlights how simply providing more obligations to contribute may not be ideal—the amount and type need to be titrated by adults to the maturation and other demands of adolescents.

Less work has examined the extent to which there may be disparities in the opportunity to contribute in peer relationships. The fact that adolescents cite their friends as their most important source of emotional support highlights how friendships allow youths to contribute to other people. Way and Chen (2000) reported that in the context of poor, urban schools, Asian American youths are less likely to report having friendships characterized by support and trust. The same has been found for male as compared with female youths, particularly during the years of late adolescence (Way, 2011; Way and Chen, 2000). Whether these patterns extend more broadly, or whether there are inequalities in other aspects of peer relationships relevant to contribution—offering ideas, working toward shared goals—remains to be determined.

Comprehensive assessment of opportunities

Comprehensive assessments of the availability of actual opportunities for adolescents to contribute to other people across different settings are needed. Traditionally, these opportunities have been assessed in separate areas of research that focus on families, peers, schools, and communities. Tools for assessing contributions within each setting exist, such as participation in decision-making in families and classrooms (Eccles et al., 1993; Steinberg, 2001), the provision of instrumental and social support to friends (Schacter & Margolin, 2019; Telzer & Fuligni, 2009), extracurricular involvement (Vandell et al., 2015), participation in community programming (Lerner, Almerigi, Theokas, & Lerner, 2005), and civic engagement (Wray-Lake, Metzger, & Syvertsen, 2017). These tools should be integrated in order to develop an inventory of opportunities across the diverse settings of adolescents’ lives. The frequency of these activities should be assessed in order to estimate the optimum amount for youths, as well as disparities in their availability across known social gradients, such as gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background.

Equally important would be to examine youths’ sense of whether their contributions in each setting are valued and have an impact. Social value and impact engender a sense of status and respect, feelings that adolescents increasingly seek as they progress through puberty and beyond (Yeager et al., 2018). Therefore, any inventory of the opportunities to contribute would need to simultaneously assess youths’ beliefs that friends, families, schools, and communities appreciate and value their efforts. These features are enhanced by providing adolescents with the chance to play an active role in the planning and leadership of the activities themselves (Eccles & Gootman, 2002). Assessing quality as well as quantity will differentiate developmentally rich opportunities from those that simply exist for packing a resume for future education and employment. The latter, although more available in advantaged communities, likely confer few of the positive psychological and health benefits of contribution to youths.

Expanded measurement of discrimination and marginalization

Theories of discrimination and marginalization cover the extensive ways in which resources, opportunities, and treatment are differentially received by people according to factors such as gender, ethnicity, sexual identity and orientation, socioeconomic background, and immigrant status. The measurement tools used for adolescents typically focus on experiences of direct hostility and exclusion, as well as the signaling of “otherness” that suggests that some youths do not belong by virtue of their social category (e.g., race or ethnicity; Benner et al., 2018).

The measurement of discrimination and marginalization could be enhanced by adding greater attention to the extent to which youths perceive messages that their contributions to the social world are devalued, unwelcome, and thwarted. Some measures have individual items that have come close. For example, the Public Regard subscale of the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI) includes “Society views Black people as an asset” (Sellers, Smith, Shelton, Rowley, & Chavous, 1998). The marginalization subscale of the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans (Cuellar, Arnold, & Maldonado, 1995) incorporates questions that focus on whether one feels accepted by the larger culture. Critical consciousness measures, such as that by Diemer, Rapa, Park, and Perry (2017), include items that ask about the importance of action or a sense of agency to make social change, but they typically do not assess the belief that one’s contributions are blocked or devalued.

Questions on existing scales can be reframed and expanded to more directly tap potential disparities in youths’ experiences with messages regarding their contribution to the broader social world. For example, specific items could assess youths’ perceptions that their attempts at contribution—suggestions, recommendations for organizational change, offers to help a group—are dismissed, ignored, or unwelcomed in various settings. Other questions may tap adolescents’ experiences with more explicit exclusion from opportunities to provide support or resources or to contribute to a shared goal. More generally, adolescents’ beliefs that the contributions of their particular social group (e.g., gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation) are unwelcomed and dismissed in the larger society could be assessed in ways similar to the Public Regard items of the MIBI scale that ask about whether society holds a broadly negative view of African Americans (Sellers et al., 1998). Notably, the MIBI was designed to measure ethnic identity, and the suggestion to expand the items in regard to contribution highlights how emergent views of contribution may be closely tied to a parallel development of social identity (Tyler & Degoey, 1995).

Integrating the measurement of the opportunity to contribute with traditional assessments of discrimination could shed light on the complex dynamics among experienced hostility, devaluation, and doing things for other people. Discrimination has been linked with prosocial behavior toward one’s group and civic engagement (Hope & Jagers, 2014), whereas other work has suggested that the direction of the association may depend on the type of prosocial behavior being assessed (Davis et al., 2016). Additionally, measuring the existence of actual opportunities to engage in such behaviors would help to flesh out the conditions in which adolescents experiencing marginalization find ways to impact their social worlds. Incorporating identity and autonomy development into these assessments would be valuable because youths at different points in their development can react differently to the experience of marginalization (Sumner, Burrow, & Hill, 2018). Finally, inductive approaches that do not impose preconceived definitions of what counts as meaningful contributions are critical. Inviting adolescents to play a part in the research enterprise itself, a practice known as youth-led participatory-action research (Ozer, 2017), could identify meaningful contributions that have been neglected or underappreciated by existing dominant paradigms of adolescent development.