U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Promoting Positive Youth Development: Relational Data Analysis (RDA)

NCJ Number
222443
Journal
Journal of Adolescent Research Volume: 23 Issue: 3 Dated: May 2008 Pages: 291-309
Author(s)
William M. Kurtines; Marilyn J. Montgomery; Lisa Lewis Arango; Gabrielle Kortsch; Richard Albrecht; Arlene Garcia; Rachel Ritchie; Kyle Eichas
Date Published
May 2008
Length
19 pages
Annotation
This article presents an overview of the origins and use of "relational data analysis" (RDA) as a means of unifying program data on youth development across dimensions (quantitative/qualitative, causal/structural, observation/interpretation, etc.) and phases of analyses (conceptual, theoretical, and research analyses) in the course of evaluating a youth development program (Miami Youth Development Program) for troubled youth in a "real-world" setting.
Abstract
Developed as part of the Miami Youth Development Program (YDP), RDA was devised to provide a unified framework under which developmental scientists involved in this project could identify patterns of qualitative change in the meaning and significance of life-course experiences of the multiproblem youth participating in YDP interventions. This article explains how evaluation researchers used RDA in developing qualitative methods for coding the openended interview response data from youth. It describes how researches used RDA in analyzing interview data so as to capture transformational change in the subjective meaning and significance of participants' life-course experiences. The overview of RDA presented in this article focuses on its basic forward movement through three analytical phases of RDA's core cycle (conceptual, theoretical, and research analysis). The intent of RDA as described is to develop practical qualitative measures and methods for collecting narrative expressions of subjective experiences that can be coded with a level of reliability and validity that parallels that of quantitative measures and methods. This results in a systematic measure of positive changes in human development and the coding of factors in those changes for diverse youth acting in and influenced by variable settings. This results in both the testing and revision of existing hypotheses about human development as well as the creation of new or integrated theories for future testing. 2 tables, 1 figure, and 19 references