On the importance of attending to meaning, contextualization, and collaboration for character intervention development for adolescents

Positive psychology offers numerous evidence-based interventions to build character strengths, but most target adults, with fewer addressing the needs of adolescents. This special issue highlights research on the development of character strength interventions for adolescents in out-of-school settings. Because adolescents are embedded in multifaceted developmental systems, interventions to promote virtue must attend to the contextual features of the implementation environments. Accordingly, a scholar-practitioner model of research allows researchers to partner with practitioners who are experts on the contexts adolescents inhabit in their daily lives. Finally, theory and research suggest that virtue interventions are most effective when they attend to the cultivation of a beyond-the-self, transcendent purpose, but few do so because of the challenges of studying spirituality in pluralistic settings. The interventions examined in this special issue focus on how meaning-making opportunities and spiritual experiences affect a sense of connection to something bigger than the self to promote character development.