← Back to Vol. 04 Issue No. 03 — October
Abstract
_________________________________________________________________________ Recent research studies indicate that strengths possessed by underprivileged youth may mediate the impact potentiated by adverse life circumstances on deleterious developmental outcomes in Foster Care (Smokowski, Reynolds, & Bezruczko, 2000). As such, this study proposed to explore the processes by which strengths may act as mechanisms of psychiatric improvement by delineating the influences of strengths upon developmental outcomes (Gillham, Reivich, & Shatte, 2002). This paper also identifies the main predicting factors of strength based services for youth in foster care. Effective treatment in foster care formative years often leads to positive contributions made by youth who overcome disadvantage and mature into generative adults, while society must devote human and financial resources to assist and remediate youth who remain limited by adverse circumstances. This paper determines whether pairs of correlations differed significantly at the alpha level of .05, by using a t-test for differences between strength and needs dependently sampled correlations.