Maryse Richards - US grants

psychological stressor; stress; interpersonal relations; emotional dependency; attitude; mental health information system; family structure /dynamics; child care; child behavior; adolescence (12-20); mother child interaction; emotional adjustment; employment of women; psychological models; questionnaires;

The purpose of this project is to examine the relationships between early adolescent daily experience and psychological adjustment in early, middle and late adolescence. Numerous scholars have hypothesized that the changes of early adolescence make it a critical period for the development of mental health or illness. This project evaluates this hypothesis, giving special attention to daily experience and the daily ecology of adolescent life, including patterns of day-to-day stress and teens' ongoing strategies of coping. The project is a continuation of a study in which 505 randomly selected 5th to 9th graders provided 19,000 reports on random moments in their lives. Following the procedures of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), these older children and young adolescents carried pagers for one week and reported on their situations and internal states in response to signals sent via the pagers. In addition, a sample of 112 mothers and fathers (56 families) carried pagers and provided ESM self-reports concurrently with their adolescent children. The new proposal includes further indepth analyses of these existing data, examining the relationship of adolescent adjustment with: a) the experience of daily positive and negative events, b) patterns of affect with parents and peers, c) involvement in sports and other organized leisure activities, d) television viewing, e) maternal employment, and f) the moods and activities of teenagers' parents. In order to study the relationships between early adolescent experience and adjustment in middle and late adolescence, two new longitudinal data collections will be conducted with members of the original sample. The "Biennial Data Collection," carried out at the University of Illinois at Urbana, will obtain systematic follow-up information on all of the students at intervals 2, 4, and 6 years after their original participation. The "Rebeeping Data Collection," carries out at Loyola University, will obtain a second set of ESM data on approximately 300 students at a point 4 years after their original participation, giving special attention to processes of daily coping. These longitudinal data will allow us to study trajectories of individual change and evaluate hypothesized paths of causality between early adolescent stress, daily experience, and the development of positive adjustment or psychopathology.

Exposure to community violence has become endemic to life in the inner cities for most youth. Evidence suggests the negative psychological and behavioral effects of trauma associated with exposure to violence. It is at the entrance to adolescence when many children experience greater unstructured and unsupervised time which puts them at risk for exposure to violence. As children enter adolescence, exposure may form a pivotal, "tipping" experience that sets them on a path of more exposure and participation in violence as well as other behavioral and psychological difficulties. The goal of this project is to 1) examine and identify what types of contexts outside of school would be considered contexts of risk for exposure to violence and which are protective, to 2) examine both the acute and sustained effects of exposure to violence on psychological and behavioral well-being, and to 3) examine the full model of bidirectional influences among all the constructs. The use of a time sampling method, the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), will allow us to examine the immediate daily experience of both "risky contexts", "protective contexts", violence, and the trauma associated with exposure to violence. The project will follow 200 African American young adolescent urban youth from the sixth through the eighth grade. The focus will be on youth living on the margins of poverty and in poor neighborhoods. A combination of traditional hierarchial multiple regressions, structural equation modeling, and multilevel (ML) regressions will be utilized to test our hypotheses. Analyses will examine causal relations both at the immediate, daily and hour to hour level, and the year to year level. This project will directly benefit social policy by identifying what types of time are associated with risk of exposure to violence and establishing a causal relationship to specific emotional symptoms. Scientific evidence that certain types of time are causally related to increased risk will strengthen the case for programs that provide alternatives for youths' time and will provide valuable information for policy makers and legislators considering policies aimed at influencing adolescents' time.

Understanding how discipline in schools occurs and its effects on students and others in the educational system implicate scholarly and policy arenas. This project will examine traditional and emerging approaches to discipline commonly employed in schools by studying these approaches together as opposed to in isolation. In doing so, this research will provide an appreciation of several disciplinary measures in schools, how they operate in tandem, and how students and others perceive these approaches to discipline.

Employing a mixed methods approach, this project will integrate several literatures across fields to provide an understanding of disciplinary approaches to youth in schools. The project will recruit student and staff perspectives to explore the effects of differing types of discipline and ways to respond to harm and violation in schools. This research will employ student focus groups in the process of survey development, including self-reporting by students about their own experiences and an experiment to ascertain student responses to various disciplinary scenarios. School staff and law enforcement also will be interviewed, providing a comparison of perceptions between students and authorities. Working under the rubric of procedural and restorative justice theories, this project will aid in understanding issues of school safety, fairness, and justice, with a particular focus on youth perceptions of these issues. Findings will be widely disseminated and made available to scholars, school officials, policy makers, and other stakeholders.

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.