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Scouting Life Skills Study

March 01, 2021

Kwe, Scouting Volunteers,

My name is William Johnson, I am a student at Dalhousie University currently completing an honours degree in Kinesiology. I have participated in Scouting now for a majority of my life. I have witnessed the potential that Scouting has for generating positive experiences for youth. How Scouting achieves this probably involves many different factors, and as part of my honour’s thesis research project, I would like to investigate one possible contender: life skills. Life skills are the abilities that one uses to be healthy, happy, and productive in the contexts they encounter in their life.

Typically, life skills are measured through a self-report survey. I have adapted a youth life skills survey, that is normally done in person, to be taken online. I will be sending out a link for Scouts and Venturer Scouts to participate in my survey on March 1st – March 18th, 2021. I would appreciate when this happen that you would pass this link onto the parents of your Scouts and Venturer Scouts. It should take approximately 30 minutes for youth to complete. Parents will have to click through a parental consent page, youth will have to go through a youth assent page and can leave at any time. I will not be counting incomplete surveys, and all survey data will be anonymous.

I hope that the discussion around the results of this preliminary study will make way for future investigation to scientifically illustrate how our wonderful program can consistently elevate and inspire youth. Your group has the choice to allow your members to participate or not. Your choice will not impact your Scouting, nor will individual youth participation or abstention. More information will come out with the survey link. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the survey please feel free to reach out to either myself at william.johnson@dal.ca, or my supervisor, Dr. Lori Dithurbide at is lori.dithurbide@dal.ca.

Promotion Survey Link.docx