African American Parents' Beliefs about Race and Discrimination, Socialization Practices, and Their Adolescents' Socioemotional Functioning

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The goal of this postdoctoral fellowship award is to facilitate the professional development of a young scientist. In this project, the PI seeks to understand the nature of African American parents' beliefs about race and discrimination and how those beliefs impact their emotion- and race-related socialization and their adolescent's socioemotional functioning. This research highlights the importance of utilizing a mixed methods approach to understand how parenting patterns relate to the meaning-making around race in the socialization agenda of African American parents. The research audience gains a better understanding of how certain parenting patterns contribute to a variety of adolescent socioemotional skills, particularly in racially integrated academic settings. The research also examines a diverse sample of African American parents, allowing for the identification of pattern similarities in parenting experiences, despite socioeconomic background. Findings are disseminated among the scientific community, scholars, and community stakeholders and will advance the current literature on the importance of both general and race-specific parenting processing in African American families. In addition, this research broadens the participation of underrepresented groups in social science research by involving minority undergraduate and graduate students as research assistants. Through data collection and management, undergraduate and graduate students gain skills in conducting survey research, interviewing, and they also receive the opportunity to present the findings from this research at national conferences. These opportunities help prepare minority students for later success in the pursuit of graduate degrees and academic careers.Several models of parental socialization suggest that parents' beliefs are important for both parenting behaviors and also for children's outcomes. Currently, there is little empirical work examining the role of parental beliefs associated with race and discrimination in guiding general and race-specific socialization and subsequent relations with adolescent competence in African American families. This line of inquiry is particularly relevant given the history of African Americans being targets of racial discrimination and parents being faced with the challenge of raising their children to be successful in a society in which their racial group is often devalued and made victims of individual/institutional racism and race-related violence. Further, although there is growing scholarship on examining racial socialization among African American families, there is little consideration of the role of emotion-related processes surrounding the experience of and preparation for race-related experiences (e.g., racial discrimination). We know racial socialization contributes to adolescents' overall well-being and ability to cope with discrimination, yet it is still unclear how race-related socialization processes work independently of and/or jointly with other general socialization processes (e.g., emotion socialization) that are known to have great impact on children's socioemotional competence. The current study builds on the principal investigator's previous work by using a mixed-methods approach with both interview and questionnaire data to examine the content of parents' beliefs about race and discrimination, the contribution of these beliefs to their emotion and racial socialization practices, and the existence of parent profiles by their beliefs and socialization behaviors. Finally, parents' profiles are examined as predictors of their adolescents' socioemotional functioning. The participants are 300 African American parents, their 6th grade children, and the adolescents' teachers. Families are followed for three years. In year 1, parents participate in semi-structured interviews and students and teachers will complete surveys. In subsequent years, parents, students, and teachers complete online surveys. The sample is drawn from three racially and economically diverse schools in Southeastern Michigan. The current study contributes to theory and research seeking to understand how parents' beliefs about race and discrimination play a role in their parenting strategies and in their children's development. The framework being developed in this research will inform future research and interventions aimed at understanding and fostering parental strategies that contribute to the positive development of African American youth.