Risk and Resilience Among African American Youth

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): While poverty and disadvantage increase a child's risk for emotional or behavioral problems, most African American youth grow up to be competent, well-adjusted individuals. Past research has devoted little attention to the community, family, or personal characteristics that create this resilience. The proposed longitudinal study is concerned with addressing these issues. We will test models based upon a life-course perspective that views children's developmental trajectories as a sequence of causal factors in which dependent variables become independent variables over time. The models will be concerned with explaining discontinuity, as well as continuity, in behavior across the life course. We will strive to specify the manner in which life events, social transitions, and community contextual factors combine to either accentuate or redirect behavioral tendencies. The data for the proposed research will be collected from an existing sample of 897 African American children and their families living in Iowa and Georgia. Data were collected from these families when the target children were in 5th grade. A second wave of information is currently being collected on these children who are now in 7th grade. We seek funding to collect two additional waves of data as the target children move through the adolescent years. The information collected as part of the prior project will provide important baseline information for investigating the cumulative successes and disadvantages, as well as turning points, of the target children as they move through the adolescent years. Combining the previously collected data with two additional waves of information will enable us to examine causal priorities and conditional influences at work among family, peer, school, and community factors as they combine to influence the psychosocial development of African American children.