The Police Athletic League: Using sport as a vehicle for positive youth development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Positive Youth Development has been described as a proactive approach to facilitate the development of youth (Pittman & Fleming, 1991). In recent years, the PYD approach has been incorporated into many community programs to prepare and engage youth for the future (Lerner, 2007; Wenger, 2010). However, formal evaluations of such programs are sparse and therefore very little information regarding the effectiveness of these interventions is known. The Boys and Girls Club offers a youth sport program known as the Police Athletic League (PAL). The overall mission of PAL is to provide a barrier-free program that uses recreation as a tool for social development. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceived impact of participation in PAL on the development of youth. The Youth Experiences Survey was completed by 108 youth and ten of these youth completed semi-structured interviews. The results indicated that youth perceived the PAL as a program that helped them develop athletic skills (M=3.63), put forth effort (M=3.49), establish diverse peer relationships (M=3.26), learn how to take initiative (M=3.14), and develop a sense of belonging in their community (M=3.13). The results of the interviews further supported these findings as the themes that emerged detailed PAL as a fun, safe and accessible environment that enables friendships to emerge, acts as a catalyst for the development of positive life skills, and facilitates the transference of skills to outside domains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".