Leveraging Ethnic-Racial Identity in Support of Adolescent Psychosocial Adjustment

Abstract

Ethnic-racial identity (i.e., ERI; the ways in which individuals develop and ascribe meaning to their ethnic-racial identification; Umaña-Taylor, Quintana et al., 2014) has emerged as a key competency that promotes adolescent psychosocial adjustment and helps to attenuate risks like ethnic-racial discrimination (Neblett et al., 2012). However, as we seek to better understand how ERI promotes and is protective of adolescent adjustment, several important questions remain underexplored. For example, we should expand our understanding of not only how unique aspects of ERI inform adjustment but also how the patterns in which different ERI components coexist inform adjustment. Additionally, schools are a key developmental context in adolescence and building a clearer understanding of how school-based practices facilitate the relation between ERI and adjustment is critical. This dissertation addresses these gaps.

Study 1 utilized latent profile analysis to uncover profiles of ERI among Black and Latinx adolescents (n=692) and examined whether profile membership was associated with (a) indicators of academic and psychological adjustment, and (b) differences in the strength of the relation between discrimination and indicators of adjustment. Findings revealed three profiles. As hypothesized, the profile highest in ERI across all indicators reported the highest adjustment across indicators of adjustment. The other two profiles were different in their positive feelings about their ethnic-racial group membership, and the group that felt more positively reported better psychological adjustment. These findings were consistent with theoretical notions of the promotive benefits of developing a positive self-concept in relation to a marginalized identity (e.g., Umaña-Taylor, Quintana, et al., 2014). I did not find evidence that profile membership was associated with differences in the relation between discrimination and adjustment.

Study 2 utilized qualitative interview data (interviews=30) to examine the mechanisms through which an 8th grade English Language Arts (i.e., ELA) teacher’s implementation of an ERI-focused unit (i.e., the Identity Unit) informed students’ ELA engagement. Results suggested that the teacher’s implementation of an ERI-focused intervention, as couched within an ELA unit, was associated with adolescents’ increased ELA engagement; findings suggested this process unfolded by promoting students’ ERI development, targeting critical consciousness development, leveraging personally relevant texts, and building class community.