More than attendance: the importance of after-school program quality

The need for affiliation is a fundamental human motive that drives individuals to form and maintain interpersonal relationships. This universal drive varies in intensity among individuals due to genetic predispositions and life experiences, shaping it into a relatively stable personality trait. Social inclusion enhances emotional well-being by fulfilling the need for affiliation, whereas social exclusion leads to distress, negative emotions, and cognitive impairments.Psychological and Emotional...

Reliability and validity are two important considerations that must be made with any type of data collection. Reliability refers to the ability to consistently produce a given result. In the context of psychological research, this would mean that any instruments or tools used to collect data do so in consistent, reproducible ways.

Community-based interventions in mental health represent a paradigm shift from institution-centered care to treatments embedded within the fabric of local communities. By prioritizing inclusion and leveraging existing societal structures, this approach fosters a supportive environment conducive to addressing mental health challenges while promoting individual dignity and agency.
Foundations of Community Mental Health Programs
Central to the success of community-based interventions is the...

Not all intergroup interactions lead to negative outcomes. Sometimes, being in a group situation can improve performance. Social facilitation occurs when an individual performs better when an audience is watching than when the individual performs the behavior alone. This typically occurs when people are performing a task for which they are skilled.

Once data is collected from both the experimental and the control groups, a statistical analysis is conducted to find out if there are meaningful differences between the two groups. A statistical analysis determines how likely any difference found is due to chance (and thus not meaningful). In psychology, group differences are considered meaningful, or significant, if the odds that these differences occurred by chance alone are 5 percent or less. Stated another way, if we repeated this...

Correlation means that there is a relationship between two or more variables (such as ice cream consumption and crime), but this relationship does not necessarily imply cause and effect. When two variables are correlated, it simply means that as one variable changes, so does the other. We can measure correlation by calculating a statistic known as a correlation coefficient. A correlation coefficient is a number from -1 to +1 that indicates the strength and direction of the relationship between...