Youth and Democracy: Participation for Personal, Relational, and Collective Well-being

Various traditions within developmental science and psychology have concentrated on either personal or collective correlates as manifestations of well-being. Our claim is that the well-being of any one person is highly dependent on the well-being of her relationships and on the community in which she resides ~Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2005; Prilleltensky, Nelson, & Peirson, 2001!. Well-being may be defined as a positive state of affairs in which the personal, relational, and collective needs and aspirations of individuals and communities are fulfilled. Well-being refers to a satisfactory state of affairs for individual youth and communities that encompass more than the absence of risk. Our definition of well-being is in line with comprehensive conceptualizations of health promotion and youth development that emphasize the values of selfdetermination, participation, community capacity-building, structural determinants, and social justice ~Lerner, 2004!. In this article, we introduce a framework for understanding well-being in general and the well-being of youth in particular. In addition, we offer a model for analyzing interventions designed to promote personal and collective well-being. Finally, we discuss the contributions of the authors of this special issue to our analytical and intervention frameworks. We start by introducing a framework of well-being ~Prilleltensky & Prilleltensky, 2006!. We distinguish among sites, signs, sources, and strategies of well-being for youth and for society at large. These are the parts that comprise the whole of well-being.