Do Family Assets Mediate the Relationship Between Community Assets and Youths' Perceived Spirituality?

With increasing interest in the role of spirituality in youth development, and recent findings linking it to positive development, the authors investigated contextual factors that are potentially linked to youths' perceived spirituality. Using parent–child data from the 4‐H Study of Positive Youth Development, they took a social ecological approach to investigate the links between family and community factors and youths' self‐ratings of spirituality; specifically, they tested whether family factors mediated the relationship between community factors and youths' perceived spirituality. The results indicated that the presence of positive caring adults in a given community was positively related to youths' spirituality, and this link was partially mediated by family religious experience across different conceptions of spirituality. Although these findings have implications for how parents and practitioners engage youth to develop and nurture their spiritual lives, future studies will need more diverse samples and investigate more specific contextual processes that undergird youth spiritual development.