Purpose Although studies have examined character virtues among youth, few have explored the perspectives of young people who move from disconnection with social structures to reconnection and engagement—often referred to as “opportunity youth”—through the lens of positive youth development. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative study explores gratitude, generosity and hope from the experience of youth receiving social services to support stability in the transition to adulthood and the observations of their caseworkers. Findings Focus groups with 23 opportunity youth and individual interviews with 10 caseworkers reveal that youth connected gratitude to spirituality for the help they had received and viewed helping peers as a chance to give back and pay it forward. Caseworkers’ accounts concurred. Despite having limited resources, opportunity youth reflected on and valued generosity as contributing to positive outcomes for themselves and their peers. Some caseworkers expressed concerns about opportunity youth’s generosity being exploited. Most opportunity youth saw hope as a guiding philosophy, while some noted that experiences of hopelessness also shaped their understanding of hope. Some caseworkers were concerned about the hesitancy of opportunity youth to hope due to fear of disappointment. Practical implications The views of opportunity youth on integrating character education into youth services are discussed. Originality/value Findings have implications for character education from the voices of opportunity youth and their caseworkers through strength perspectives relative to a deficit-centered lens.

The hardships faced by youth experiencing or at-risk for experiencing homelessness, or opportunity youth, are well documented. Programs for these youth are often deficit-based, failing to recognize existing strengths to foster resilience. The Good Gifts Program is a positive youth development intervention created collaboratively with opportunity youth, service providers, and researchers to augment existing services with the goal of nurturing gratitude, generosity, and hope. We evaluated this pilot program during a period of wide-spread service disruption (in the summer of 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic). Opportunity youth (n = 38; aged 16-24) completed up to four group sessions as well as pre- and post-test assessments, with daily diaries throughout. Results showed no overall evidence for program efficacy and, indeed, declines in gratitude, generosity, and hope with greater program attendance. The modest sample size and significant heterogeneity in program fidelity, participation, and context presented challenges to data interpretation and highlight considerations for future work.

This open access book tells the story of eight youth service organizations in the USA, using the voices of the impacted youth and the staff who accompanied them.Drawing on a series of structured interviews with young people and staff and informed by positive youth development (PYD), ideas the author proposes nine universal principles for working with youth from under-resourced neighborhoods that can be applied to any youth organization. The principles include orienting youth towards a purposeful future, providing an opportunity to build academic and critical thinking abilities, and developing individual’s identity and sense of agency. The book contributes to the emerging methodology of principles-focused evaluation and draws on range of disciplines including psychology, education and youth studies. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Thrive Foundation.

The study of intellectual humility is still in its early stages and issues of definition and measurement are only now being explored. To inform and guide the process of defining and measuring this important intellectual virtue, we conducted a series of studies into the implicit theory – or ‘folk’ understanding – of an intellectually humble person, a wise person, and an intellectually arrogant person. In Study 1, 350 adults used a free-listing procedure to generate a list of descriptors, one for each person-concept. In Study 2, 335 adults rated the previously generated descriptors by how characteristic each was of the target person-concept. In Study 3, 344 adults sorted the descriptors by similarity for each person-concept. By comparing and contrasting the three person-concepts, a complex portrait of an intellectually humble person emerges with particular epistemic, self-oriented, and other-oriented dimensions.

In this paper, we explore the literature on cognitive heuristics and biases in light of virtue epistemology, specifically highlighting the two major positionsagent-reliabilism and agent-responsibilism (or neo-Aristotelianism)as they apply to dual systems theories of cognition and the role of motivation in biases. We investigate under which conditions heuristics and biases might be characterized as vicious and conclude that a certain kind of intellectual arrogance can be attributed to an inappropriate reliance on Type 1, or the improper function of Type 2, cognitive processes. By the same token, the proper intervention of Type 2 processes results in the virtuous functioning of our cognitive systems (agent-reliabilism). Moreover, the role of motivation in attenuating cognitive biases and the cultivation of certain epistemic habits (a search for accuracy, being accountable for one's judgments, the use of rules of analysis, and exposure to differing perspectives) points to the tenets of agent-responsibilism in epistemic virtue. We identify the proper use of Type 2 cognitive processes and the habits of mind that attenuate biases as demonstrations of the virtue of intellectual humility. We briefly explore the nature of these habits and the contribution of personality traits, situational pressures, and training in their cultivation.