Education and Rapid Socio-Cultural Change: A Longitudinal Mixed-Methods Assessment of Secondary Education in a Developing World Context

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The goals of this project are first, to examine the role of secondary education as a mediator of globalizing cultural change in subjective and objective outcomes for the demographic shift cohort in a rapidly changing socio-cultural and economic context; and second, to inform theory, policy, and practice regarding the mushrooming global health concern of adolescent well-being. To accomplish these goals this research will extend a longitudinal study of a key cohort of young women's experiences of cultural and economic change to examine and explain important outcomes in their lives. In doing so, this research will provide experience-near data on processes of globalization as mediated by education. It will also assess and report on outcomes in relation to both local and global indicators of adolescent well-being including identification of points for policy and practice interventions. Through a mixed-methods ethnographic approach using interviews, surveys, and archival research, this study utilizes a unique opportunity to track iterative processes of individuals within their changing cultural context over time in order to explain (i.e. not simply describe) significant outcomes in their lives. This project aims to advance theory on subjective processes involved in globalization for young people with a focus on intracultural variation, education, and subjective experience. Specifically, this study applies a human development perspective to youth-related globalization theories to articulate the iterative processes of personal meaning making and rapid cultural and institutional change. It will explain how individuals in a critical historical moment of cultural change have made sense of socio-cultural, institutional, and economic change and employed educational experience to selectively craft new pathways in their own lives. The project has broad impacts on policy and practice regarding growing global concerns related to adolescent well-being, and it impacts methodological expansion of ethnographic techniques in longitudinal cultural anthropology studies. Results will point to key arenas and sensitive periods for evaluating institutional interventions to promote general well-being for youth undergoing rapid cultural change and contribute a rare person-centered ethnographic model of a panel study in cultural anthropology while training graduate and undergraduate students.