Niobe Way - US grants

The aim of the proposed project is to gain a greater understanding of same-sex friendships, and the contextual factors that influence these relationships among urban adolescents. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, the project will examine the perceptions of same-sex friendships; assess the influence of self esteem, family relationships, and perceptions of school climate on the quality of same-sex friendships; and determine ethnic and gender differences in the perceptions of same-sex friendships among urban, poor and working class, ethnic minority adolescents. The intent of the project is to generate hypotheses. Exploratory, hypothesis- generating research is essential for understanding those populations about whom we have little knowledge and who have been excluded from theory building research (Jessor, 1993). The project rests upon the assumption that to understand the nature of human relationships, one must examine the subjective experiences of these relationships (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, Lewin, 1951); and that the examination of the relational and institutional contexts in which human development occurs is an essential element of any investigation of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Peer relationships play a central role in the development of adaptive and maladaptive behavior among adolescents (Hartup, 1993; Savin-Williams & Berndt, 1990). Therefore, it is critical that mental health professionals examine and understand these relationships and the contextual factors that influence them. Ninety tenth-grade African-American, Latino, and Asian-American students attending a public high school in New York City will be recruited for this study. Equal numbers of African-American, Latino, and Asian American students and equal numbers of boys and girls within each of the three ethnic groups will be recruited from general education classrooms. The students will be asked to independently complete a set of standardized questionnaires and participate in one-to-one, semi-structured interviews. The standardized questionnaires and semi-structured interviews will focus on the adolescents' perceptions of their relationships with family members, their self esteem, the school climate, and the quality of their same-sex friendships. The quantitative data analysis will involve correlational and hierarchical multiple regression analyses, and multivariate analysis of variance. The qualitative data will be analyzed using two data analytic techniques (Miles & Huberman, 1985; Miller, 1988).

Close friendships among adolescents are known to contribute to cognitive and social development, psychological adjustment, and future socio-economic health. Adolescents who have difficulties finding or maintaining friendships are more likely as adults to be unemployed, be overly aggressive, or to experience serious mental health problems. Past research has uncovered many of the correlates, consequences, and quality of adolescent friendships. However, two constraints produce a limit on understanding of adolescent friendships. First, past research on friendships has focused primarily on white, middle class adolescents. Second, past research has not been conducted on the contextual factors that predict these formative relationships over time. The current program of research responds to these limitations by continuing a longitudinal, quantitative and qualitative study of friendships among urban African-American, Latino, and Asian American adolescents from low-income families. Two waves of data were collected in the fall of 1997 and the fall of 1998 when the adolescents were in the ninth and tenth grade, respectively. The follow-up study seeks to collect two more waves of data during the fall of 1999 and the spring of 2001 when the adolescents are seniors in high school and one-year out of high school, respectively. Drawing from ecological theories of development, the study addresses three sets of research questions: 1) How do contextual variables (family relationships, parental attitudes and rules, school climate, and neighborhood climate) influence the quality and characteristics of adolescent friendships? 2) What are the consequences of the quality and characteristics of friendships on psychological and behavioral adjustment over time? 3) How do adolescents experience their friendships? What are the gender and ethnic differences and age-related changes in their experiences of friendships? Why do such differences and changes occur? Understanding the mechanisms and factors that enhance or undermine friendships among urban, ethnic minority, low SES youth is critical to help such youth grow to be well-adjusted and healthy adults.

Abstract

New York University: Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education

Joshua Aronson, Diane Hughes, Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, Niobe Way &
Hiro Yoshikawa

Despite thousands of research studies, hundreds of remedial programs, and decades of being considered a crisis for American society, the chronic academic underachievement of numerous ethnic minority groups continues to perplex educators, social scientists, and policy makers. Three trends add weight to the crisis. First, within the next 50 years, people identified currently as "minority" will comprise half of the U.S. population. Second, particularly in large urban centers like New York, new waves of immigrants are arriving, ensuring fundamental, but unknown changes to the structure and dynamics of schools and other contexts. Third, the U.S. continues to evolve into a "knowledge-driven" economy, making a solid education vital for an increasingly large sector of the workforce. More than ever, a sizable proportion of our nation's children are at risk of academic failure and economic hardship.
Faculty from multiple scientific disciplines at New York University will use NSF funding to support planning activities over a 6- to 9-month period pertaining to research that will be pursued under the proposed Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education. The central aim of the Center will be to examine how homes, schools, peers, work, and the media jointly contribute to the engagement, learning, and school performance of children from diverse cultures.
Three steps are needed to accomplish this mission. First, we propose to describe the experiences of minority children within each of the educationally relevant contexts. Many social scientists focus on determining the predictors of children's academic outcomes without a deep understanding of children's everyday experiences. Such descriptive work is notably absent in research focused on ethnic minorities. We need systematic knowledge regarding how contexts such as home, peers, school, parents' work, and the media differ or are experienced differently by children from different cultures, ethnicities or social classes. Second, we seek to understand how these experiences shape children's engagement, learning and performance in school, and whether and how such connections may vary by culture, ethnicity, and social class. Third, our ultimate goal is to advance an understanding of how home, peer, school, work, and the media work together in explaining children's academic achievement.
The second mission of the Center is educational: to transmit its research findings, through training and dissemination, to three communities: (1) a new generation of scholars of diverse backgrounds who are engaged in research on culture and its role in child learning, engagement, and performance; (2) the broader research community; and (3) policy makers and practitioners in education. This will occur through an intensive and rigorous training program and a variety of dissemination strategies of both research findings and lessons for policy and educational practice.
The proposed Center is situated within a School of Education, in the vibrant, incomparably diverse context of New York City, making it an unparalleled locale for studying culture and schools, and an ideal place to establish a think tank capable of attracting additional scholars and students of the highest quality. Through the work of the Center, we aim to bring about a deeper understanding of the interplay of culture, development and education, and thereby enhance the nation's response to the academic underachievement of ethnic minority children.

The academic underachievement of certain ethnic minority groups in America continues to perplex educators, scientists, and policy makers, despite thousands of studies, hundreds of remedial programs, and decades of being considered a crisis. Several recent trends add weight to the crisis. First, within the next 50 years, people identified as ethnic "minority" will comprise half the U.S. population. Second, new waves of immigrants continue to arrive, ensuring fundamental but unknown changes in the intercultural dynamics of schools and other contexts. Third, the United States has evolved into a "knowledge-driven" economy, making a solid education, particularly in math and science, vital for an increasingly large sector of the workforce. Finally, recent federal legislation calls for annual standardized assessments of school children, a prospect that may disadvantage certain minorities who typically underperform on these tests. More than ever, a sizable proportion of our nation's children are at risk of academic failure, posing a serious threat to the current Administration's goal of "leaving no child behind." In line with this national goal, the Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education (CRCDE), housed at New York University (NYU) will conduct research designed to identify pathways to academic success for all children. Prior research has focused narrowly on a single context (e.g., the family, peer relationships, school quality, etc.) in predicting academic outcomes, or has investigated the roles of ethnicity, race, immigrant status, gender, or socioeconomic status separately. Neither approach, however, has adequately addressed the ways in which multiple contexts contribute to educational success and/or disparities, nor how pathways vary by developmental period and culture. Furthermore, an over-emphasis on group differences has resulted in the neglect of patterns of academic outcomes within ethnic, socioeconomic, or cultural groups. Finally, studies across all of these areas have tended to utilize single methodologies, rarely integrating survey, ethnographic, experimental, and observational methods. To address these gaps, the CRCDE will gather and disseminate data about the pathways that lead to successful academic engagement and performance among culturally diverse children and adolescents. The scientific mission of the CRCDE is to use an integrative conceptual framework, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and multiple methods to (1) identify the nature of relationships that link children's experiences in five educationally relevant contexts, home, school, peers, caregivers' work, and media, to their academic engagement and performance; (2) examine whether and how these processes vary within and across cultural groups and across developmental periods; and (3) advance an understanding of how home, peers, school, caregivers' work, and media affect one another and jointly influence children's and adolescents' academic engagement and performance. The educational mission of the CRCDE is to (1) train a new generation of scholars, especially those from underrepresented minority groups, to engage in research that advances the scientific mission; (2) produce instruments and methods that will strengthen the scientific capacity of the research community to conduct culturally sensitive research on academic engagement and performance; and (3) transmit findings to policy makers, practitioners in education, and researchers, through dissemination of findings and lessons for educational policy and practice. The Center's location in the diverse context of New York City (NYC) is ideal for a center devoted to research at the confluence of culture, development, and education.

By 2040, people identified as ?ethnic minority? will comprise half the U.S. population. In urban cities, the vast majority of children entering preschool/elementary school and high school are Latino, Asian or African American, and how well these children and their families adjust to these high-stake school transitions will have long term implications for children's developmental outcomes as well as the future of the U.S. In the context of growing diversity among the nation's children, systematic inquiry into the experiences and developmental pathways of children from different cultural communities during periods of major transitions is urgently needed.

In response, the NYU IRADS builds on 5 years of research under NYU's Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education (CRCDE), and seeks to advance scientific theory and knowledge on children's social, emotional and cognitive development in ethnically diverse populations. Plans are to follow a group of 900 urban, predominantly low-income and working class families of Mexican, Dominican, Chinese, European and African American decent with young children (4-7 years) and adolescents (13-17 years) as children enter preschool/elementary school and high school. The majority of these families have participated in the research of the CRCDE over the past several years, and have already provided rich information on the background experiences of these children and families beginning at children's birth (in the early childhood group) and entry into middle school (in the adolescent group). The five ethnic groups were selected for study, as they comprise the majority of children in New York City. In addition, they enable contrasts among groups with different immigration statuses, histories of discrimination related to race and skin color, citizenship status, and language and cultural backgrounds.

The planned activities involve continued gathering of original data on aspects of children's cognitive, social, and emotional development and experiences in home and school settings that would be most sensitive to children's experiences across critical transitions. Within the area of social development, focus will be on social competence and social identity. For cognitive development, focus will be on language/literacy, math concepts and performance, classification skills, attention abilities, and academic performance and engagement. For emotional development, focus will be on children's emotion regulation. Together, these skills form the building blocks for healthy developmental outcomes. In home and school settings, focus will be on the beliefs and practices of parents, teachers and children; the quality of relationships (e.g., parent-child, teacher child); and financial resources.

The Intellectual Merit of this research includes the generation of new, culturally grounded theory and knowledge on the development and experiences of children from diverse ethnic backgrounds across multiple developmental areas, social settings, and significant developmental transitions. The Broader Impacts are framed by a set of integrated plans to advance research and education on ethnically diverse populations through the: (1) training of a new generation of scholars (especially underrepresented minorities) to engage in research that advances the scientific mission; (2) sharing of instruments, methods, and findings so as to strengthen the scientific capacity of researchers to engage in culturally sensitive studies of children's development; (3) dissemination of findings to researchers, educators and policy makers through publications, trainings, briefings and community outreach; and (4) strengthening of local, national, and international partnerships.