Dissertation Research: Poverty, Adolescents' Future Orientation, and Resilience among Chilean and Mapuche Small Scale Farmers

在克雷格·a·哈德利博士的指导下，博士生Sebastián Dueñas（埃默里大学）将调查童年时期的贫困经历如何影响年轻人对未来的期望。其他使用生活史理论的研究发现，童年的逆境经历和不确定性会影响发展轨迹和愿望，进而影响教育成就。本研究将通过考察逆境影响人力资本期望的近似途径，对这些发现作出贡献并加以扩展。这项研究将在智利进行，在那里研究者将比较两个低社会经济地位的农村农民人口：一个马普切族（智利最大的土著少数民族）社区和一个非马普切族社区。比较研究设计将使他能够评估种族和文化差异如何影响逆境与人力资本愿望之间的关系，以及缓解逆境所采用的应对策略的可变性。他将收集混合的定性和定量数据来检验假设的关系，并将大部分调查集中在早期青少年的随机样本上。该项目有助于社会科学研究，这些研究突出了社会阶层、少数民族地位和青年文化在塑造青少年未来前景和愿望方面的作用。本研究在发展中国家的农村社区探讨了这些问题，而之前大多数关于儿童不确定性对发展的影响的工作都是在发达国家的城市环境中进行的。此外，通过关注年轻人自己采用的应对策略，该项目将突出年轻人在减轻不确定性和限制逆境对生命历程结果的负面影响方面的潜在积极作用。资助这项研究也支持了社会科学家的教育。

Doctoral student Sebastián Dueñas (Emory University), supervised by Dr. Craig A. Hadley, will investigate how experiencing poverty in childhood affects young people's aspirations for the future. Other research using life history theory has found that childhood experiences of adversity and uncertainty impact developmental trajectories and aspirations, which in turn affect educational attainment. This study will contribute to and extend these findings by looking at the proximate pathways through which adversity impacts human capital aspirations.The study will be carried out in Chile where the researcher will compare two rural peasant populations of low socio-economic status: an ethnically Mapuche (Chile's largest indigenous minority group) community and a non-Mapuche community. The comparative research design will allow him to assess how ethnic and cultural differences affect the relationship between adversity and human capital aspirations, as well as variability in coping strategies employed to mitigate adversity. He will collect a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to test hypothesized relationships, focusing much of the investigation on a random sample of early-adolescents.This project contributes to social scientific research that has highlighted the role of social class, minority status, and youth culture in shaping adolescents' future outlook and aspirations. This study explores these issues in rural communities in a developing country, whereas most previous work on the effect of childhood uncertainty on development has been carried out in urban settings in developed nations. In addition, by focusing on coping strategies employed by the young people themselves, the project will spotlight young people as potentially active agents in mitigating uncertainty and limiting the negative impact of adversity on life course outcomes. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.