Racial Identity as a Resilience Factor for African American Students

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports the training and research of a young scholar who studies the effects of racial identity in African American adolescents and college students. These populations are often academically and psychologically vulnerable when they experience racial discrimination in their daily contexts. This project explore the ways in which they cope successfully with negative race-related experiences and remain resilient academically and psychologically. The Fellow is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Black Youth in Context (CSBYC) where she has the opportunity to mentor high school and college students of color who are affiliated with the CSBYC and developing skills for careers in STEM fields. Specifically, she serves as a mentor to African American high school students who work on independent projects as part of the center's Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. This project contributes to the theory and research seeking to understand African American adolescents' and college students' racial discrimination experiences and the ways their racial identity beliefs interact with discrimination experiences to influence academic engagement and psychological health. This work contributes to the larger research literature in several ways. For instance, it will examine whether there are negative race-related experiences that African American college students experience that are not captured in traditional quantitative measures used to assess racial discrimination. This work examines the ways college students perceive their racial identity beliefs as influencing their academic engagement and motivation and psychological well-being after they have experienced racial discrimination. Additionally, the incorporation of information from data collected using a daily diary method can add complexity in the ways in which relations between discrimination, racial identity, and outcomes have traditionally been studied among African American adolescents. This project has potentially very high broader impacts for society in general and STEM education is particular.