Five-Year Follow-Up Study of the Qualitative Experiences of Youth in an Afterschool Arts Program in Low-Income Communities

Abstract

Semistructured follow-up interviews were conducted with 32 Canadian youth ages 14 to 20 years old; 5 years prior, these youth had participated in a structured arts program. Given that little is known about the long-term effects of afterschool arts-based programs, interviews took a qualitative approach to delineate adolescents’ experiences with the program and their subsequent development. The findings from the qualitative interviews suggest that skill acquisition, positive staff-youth relationships, development of team building, positive peer relationships, a sense of belonging, and program flexibility were pertinent to sustained positive youth development 5 years following program completion. This article discusses the importance of follow-up studies and implications for future research and practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.