The cultural salience of belongingness: how placement neighborhoods and ecological factors shape adolescent experiences of fitting in during out-of-home care
Creators: name: Golden Guzman, Kate
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: This mixed method, sequential explanatory study explored the relationship between community-level ethnic and racial composition and belongingness outcomes among young adults with lived adolescent experience in foster care. Little is known about how conditions of foster placement neighborhoods might facilitate a sense of belonging, potentially moderating detrimental effects on youths’ social support networks common to out-of-home (OOH) placement. This research aimed to examine whether, and how, community-level and ecological factors contribute to two constructions of belongingness: neighborhood belongingness and cultural community belongingness. Neighborhood belongingness indicates how strong a connection young people felt to their placement neighborhoods, while cultural community belongingness describes how positively young people felt about their ethnic/racial/cultural heritage group and how included they felt in it. To explicate how experiences in OOH placement ecologies (e.g., within neighborhoods, with caregivers, etc.) related to individuals’ perspectives on connection, a cultural ecological framework, PVEST (Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory) was used.This project consisted of a three-phased research design utilizing quantitative (Phase 1), qualitative (Phase 2), and integrative (Phase 3) methods. Phase 1 used a national, retrospective survey administered to 118 young adults who had been in OOH care as adolescents. Results from logistic and OLS regression analyses indicated that the concentration of white residents within placement neighborhoods increased the odds of a moderate/strong sense of inclusion in one’s placement neighborhood as did pertinent ecological factors (i.e., how connected young people felt to caregivers, the meaningfulness of their engagement in age-appropriate activities, and the racial and ethnic match between them and caregivers). The degree to which young people felt more positively connected to their racial and ethnic heritage group was not affected by the racial and ethnic composition of their placement neighborhoods but was positively predicted by community-level social cohesion.In Phase 2, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a nested sample of survey participants. To explain variation in belongingness processes, interviews were held with 22 individuals who endorsed high and low belongingness ratings. Findings identified how cultural sharedness, or felt commonalities predicated on broadly defined social characteristics (e.g., race, ethnicity, politics, religiosity, socioeconomic status, similar experiences in OOH care, etc.), facilitated fitting in but did not guarantee a sense of belonging. The values and beliefs of sociodemographic groups associated with neighborhoods could normalize or alienate youth, frequently depending on their own complex, multiple and overlapping social identities. Themes also indicate that neighborhood meaningfulness is often idiosyncratic, reflecting the unique attributions that young people placed on where they lived during OOH care. Further, this study showed that neighborhoods are not significant to all youth. Themes also underscore how foster care’s systematized structure affects how young people might search for normalcy and validation during adolescence.In Phase 3, salient outcomes from Phase 1 and Phase 2 were integrated using joint displays to produce overarching conclusions about belongingness processes. These conclusions, or meta-inferences, were based on a sample of 20 respondents who endorsed high and low neighborhood and cultural community belongingness ratings. They suggest that adolescents’ sense of neighborhood belongingness may be influenced by the social norms and ideologies that youth attribute to geographies. For instance, those who held marginalized or minoritized identities residing in areas where members of social and geographic communities espouse stigmatizing beliefs including racism, homophobia, transphobia, and prejudice rated neighborhood belongingness low. Community-level acceptance and engagement were more common among those who were comfortable in communities, spent more time in them, and less often identified as having a marginalized identity and rated neighborhood belongingness high. Ambiguous differentiation between high and low cultural community belongingness raters suggests that a sense of inclusion in one’s racial/ethnic/cultural group was intrinsic and individuated, underscoring the complexity of ethnic and racial identity development processes. In OOH care, cultural pride may be protective, yet it can also be compromised by prejudice experienced in community settings and with caregivers.Overall, the study finds that, among this sample, placement conditions and geographic community features that promote belongingness for some, can hamper it for others. Study results also suggest that adolescents in OOH care may be most able to find belongingness in settings where they can be assured of emotional support, physical safety, and unconditional acceptance. To better support youth in OOH care as they navigate normative tasks of adolescent development, policy makers and program officials need to evaluate how caregiving contexts and community settings can facilitate, rather than suppress, youths’ need for autonomous self-expression to promote connection and well-being.