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

埃默里大学博士生Latián Dueñas，由克雷格A.哈德利，将调查如何在童年经历贫困影响年轻人对未来的愿望。其他使用生活史理论的研究发现，童年时期的逆境和不确定性影响发展轨迹和愿望，这反过来又影响教育成就。本研究将通过考察逆境影响人力资本愿望的直接途径，对这些研究结果作出贡献并加以扩展。本研究将在智利进行，研究人员将比较两个社会经济地位较低的农村农民人口：一个马普切人（智利最大的土著少数民族）社区和一个非马普切人社区。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和人力资本愿望之间的关系，以及用于减轻逆境的应对策略的变化。他将收集定性和定量的混合数据来验证假设的关系，主要集中在早期青少年的随机样本调查。该项目有助于社会科学研究，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。本研究探讨了这些问题在农村社区在发展中国家，而大多数以前的工作对儿童的不确定性对发展的影响已经在发达国家的城市环境中进行。此外，该项目将重点关注青年人自己采用的应对战略，突出青年人在减轻不确定性和限制逆境对人生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.