Effects of program design and implementation factors on campers' sense of day camp as a caring community

Caring communities support the healthy growth of young people by fostering caring one-on-one relationships as well as a sense of connectedness to the overall community. Through these mechanisms, caring communities are critical context;s for positive youth development. Day camps may be uniquely situated serve as caring communities, particularly through effective program design and staff implementation. Little is known about the ways these processes foster positive youth outcomes, especially youths' perceptions of a caring community. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effects of program design and staff implementation on campers' sense of day camp as a caring community. A quasi-experimental, mixed repeated-measures design was used to assess the impact of program design and staff implementation on campers' sense of caring community. Caring one-on-one relationships between campers and camp staff facilitate a positive camper climate which in turn promotes an overall sense of connectedness to camp. Caring and connectedness, then, were the dependent variables in this study. The independent variables were a staff training targeting program design and a training targeting implementation. The design-based training oriented camp staff to a set of Caring Activities that staff members incorporated at camp. The implementation-based training focused solely on staff members' ethic of care. Three municipal day camps participated in this study, two of which received the trainings and one was a comparison condition. Campers from all three sites completed the instrumentation three times during the summer: Time One assessed baseline levels of caring and connectedness and Times Two and Three assessed the impact of each of the training sessions. Analysis of the dependent variables revealed three notable findings. First, a profile analysis of caring revealed a significant time by treatment interaction, which suggested that campers' sense of camp as a caring community depends on whether their counselors received staff training or not. A follow-up planned comparison on caring revealed a significant difference between treatment and nontreatment conditions at Time Two but not at Time Three. Profile analysis of connectedness revealed a significant but negative trend over time in both treatment and nontreatment conditions. The findings and their implications for caring communities are discussed.