Book Description

In this Research Topic, our aim is to examine how personal resources related to competencies, skills, and self-perception as well as environmental, contextual, and relational features of the social contexts of diverse youth, directly or indirectly are important to mental health and psychological well-being. As previous research on young people has mainly focused on youth’s weaknesses rather than their strengths, our use of Positive Youth Development (PYD) in working with culturally diverse youth and their well-being in this Research Topic is novel. We invite contributions from researchers that were initially presented their papers in a meeting that was held by research partners of the Cross-National Project on Positive Youth Development (CN-PYD), and who represent an international and multidisciplinary panel of experts on PYD. The CN-PYD was initiated in 2014 at the University of Bergen and has an ongoing data collection that involves approximately 10,000 minority and majority youth and emerging adults (ages 16 to 29) living in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, New Zealand, and South America. CN-PYD uses a strengths-based approach to the conceptualization of youth as resources and agentic, which is in opposition to the view of the developmental period of adolescence as being a period inherently fraught with problems and risks. The goal of the cross-national project is to assess personal strengths and contextual resources, considering how these resources come together to facilitate youth thriving and to document how young people make positive and valued contributions to themselves and others. We also advance research on the complex interplay between personal and contextual resources and their connections with risk behaviors and problems, in essence, taking a perspective of the whole child, both in terms of strengths and problems.