Character Strength Interventions in Adolescents: Engaging Scholars and Practitioners to Promote Virtue Development

The purpose of this project is to galvanize widespread scientific development of virtue interventions for adolescents across a diversity of contexts (e.g., athletic teams, religious organizations, youth community centers, online) that attend to spirituality and transcendent purpose. Target virtues for interventions include love, gratitude, hope, patience, generosity, joy, wisdom, and forgiveness. Because interventions will not bring about real-world change unless they attend to the contextual features of adolescents’ lives, we will mobilize scholar-practitioner teams to develop, test, and plan implementation for virtue interventions. We will also promote the creation of technology and new media products that foster character strengths in adolescents since youth are spending increasing amounts of time in technologically mediated contexts. Project activities include administration of two requests for proposals that will award 3-5 Character Intervention Full Grants and 3-5 Technology Innovation Grants as well as a prize for additional development of the winning Technology Grant prototype. Two conferences for grantees will be hosted to promote positive scholar-practitioner collaboration and networking, construct a cohesive measurement strategy, and share findings. The project team will conduct two pilot research studies exemplifying scholar-practitioner collaboration to examine the efficacy of a co-created virtues curriculum (developed with the Inspiriting Children Foundation) and short term service trips (with Hope Sports) to build love, gratitude, and generosity in adolescent athletes in performance contexts. Concrete deliverables will include 4-6 empirically validated virtue interventions and implementation plans, 3-5 virtue-building tech products, 10-12 peer-review articles, 12-20 academic conference presentations, publication of Virtue Interventions for Practitioners e-book, and video content describing interventions.