Summer camp youth leadership development: an investigation of adolescents’ perceptions of leadership and program value
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative study aims to explore adolescents' perceptions of leadership and Waycross Camp, specifically its Leaders-in-Training (i.e., L.I.T.) program.Data was collected through interviews with former L.I.T. program participants and reflective memos.Research aims evolved as the study progressed, ultimately posing one research question and three sub-questions.The guiding research question asked: How has Waycross Camp's L.I.T. program informed participants' notions of leadership?The remaining sub-questions asked: a) How do external factors (i.e., location, peers, or staff) contribute to Waycross Camp's L.I.T. program participants' camp experience?, b) What do participants value about Waycross Camp's L.I.T. program?, and c) How has Waycross Camp's L.I.T. program influenced participants since the program's completion?A review of the literature led to this study's conceptual framework, which included three overlapping domains: 1) "Youth development," 2) "Youth leadership," and 3) "Summer camp."Using grounded theory and constructivism, a constant comparison data analysis revealed four emergent participant themes, including 1) "Bridging the gap," 2) "Giving permission to be human," 3) "Rolling up your sleeves," and 4) "Serving the greater good."Each of these four themes yielded an outcome, including 1) "Community," 2) "Openness," 3) "Empowerment," and 4) "Character," respectively.Four camp outcomes depicted in relevant research were synthesized with the four emergent themes and their outcomes, including 1) "Social relationships," 2) "Identity and self concept," 3) "Agency and engagement," and 4) "Spirituality, ethicality, and morality," respectively.Together, the themes, outcomes, and camp outcomes produced a holistic model of youth leadership.Ultimately, these four themes, outcomes, and camp outcomes revealed an overlap between participants' valued notions of leadership and valued aspects of Waycross Camp and its L.I.T. program.In framing leadership as a relational experience, participants demonstrated an understanding of leadership congruent with contemporary leadership theories.While participants reported that some external factors (i.e., location and peers) contributed to their L.I.T. experiences, responses were mixed as to the perceived impact of L.I.T. program staff.Although participants struggled at times to identify specific skills acquired during L.I.T. that they were able to apply to specific circumstances, participants reported feeling better equipped and assured in exercising leadership after the program's completion.Furthermore, many participants attributed significant gains in life skills (e.g., compassion, understanding, etc.) to Waycross Camp experiences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".