Racial Socialization in Multiracial Families: A Mixed-Methods Investigation

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This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Fantasy T. Lozada at Virginia Commonwealth University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining the antecedents and consequences of parental racial socialization among one of the fastest-growing populations in the United States – Biracial Black-White adolescents (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018). Racial socialization, or the ways that parents talk to their children about the meaning and significance of race, is an adaptive cultural coping practice that can promote the developmental well-being of Black adolescents (García Coll et al., 1996; Murry et al., 2018). More specifically, racial socialization can lead monoracial Black adolescents to adopt positive attitudes about being Black and other Black people, which can protect them from deleterious effects of racism (Neblett et al., 2013; Peck et al., 2014). Racial socialization may be equally as important for Biracial Black-White adolescents as they experience many of the same race-related stressors as their monoracial Black peers and unique forms of Multiracial discrimination like social exclusion and exoticization (Skinner et al., 2020; Yoo et al., 2016). However, only four percent of the studies on racial socialization within the past decade included Biracial participants (Umaña‐Taylor & Hill, 2020), so we know very little about how parents of Biracial Black-White youth socialize their adolescent children around race (Stokes et al., 2020). As the U.S. becomes increasingly diverse, we must learn how sociocultural practices, like parental racial socialization, function within Multiracial families and impact youth who grow up in them. This mixed-methods project employs a new self-report measure and observational design to produce a rich conceptualization of racial socialization in Multiracial Black-White families through two phases. The first phase uses Latent Class Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling to analyze self-report data to better understand what Biracial Black-White adolescents learn about race from their parents and how it impacts their racial identity and well-being. The second phase will build upon these findings by using observational research to examine how the emotional context of the parent-adolescent relationship shapes the transmission and effectiveness of racial socialization (Yasui, 2015). More specifically, 75 Multiracial Black-White families will visit a research lab and share stories about race-related incidents in their own lives (e.g., racial stories task) or listen to vignettes about common racial dilemmas that Biracial adolescents face. The participants will be instructed to discuss the scenarios with one another and share how they did or would respond to racial matters like it while being video recorded. The recordings will then be analyzed using the Racial Socialization Observational Coding system (Smith-Bynum et al., 2016) and emotion recognition software (e.g., Noldus) to detect emotional valence and understand the relational nature (e.g., tone, comforting behavior, advocacy, etc.) of socialization exchanges. Additional analyses will explore (1) if parent-child closeness and child characteristics (e.g., gender, phenotype) influence socialization, (2) if Black and white parents differ in their emotional responses to racial dilemmas, and (3) if parents respond to monoracial experiences of discrimination differently than Multiracial experiences. Ultimately, both phases of this project will advance the theoretical understanding of racial socialization in Multiracial Black-White families. It will also begin to illuminate how interfamilial communication about race shapes how Biracial youth develop in and interact with other people in our society. This knowledge can be used to identify patterns of "stability, change, conflict, and cooperation" that contribute to the psychosocial well-being of youth with multiple racial identities and in turn, expand our fundamental understanding of racial socialization in Multiracial families.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.