African American Caregivers' Racial Socialization Profiles Across Adolescents' Transition to High School: Associations with Gender, Racial Identity, Interracial Contact, and Racial Discrimination
Creators: name: Harrison, Asya
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: African American
subject: Parental Racial Socialization
subject: Middle to high school transition
subject: Racial Discrimination
subject: Racial Centrality
subject: African-American Studies
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Social Sciences

description: In a cross-sectional sample of 598 African American caregivers and adolescents, this dissertation investigates whether and how the racial socialization messages of Black caregivers change as their children transition from middle to high school. I used latent class analysis implemented by Mplus to identify racial socialization clusters at three different time points (i.e., seventh grade, eighth grade, and ninth grade). Racial socialization clusters were comprised of three types of racial socialization messages (i.e., Navigation Capital messages, Black Cultural Immersion, and Racial Barrier messages). Navigation Capital messages represent a new racial socialization category that aligns with Yosso’s (2005) navigation capital from her model of community cultural wealth, while Black Cultural Immersion and Racial Barrier socialization messages align with previously researched constructs (e.g., White-Johnson et al., 2010). For caregivers of adolescents in the seventh grade, I identified five clusters of caregiver-reported racial socialization patterns: High Multifaceted, Black Navigation Capital, Low Multifaceted, Egalitarian Navigation Capital, and Barrier Immersion. Caregivers with adolescents in the eighth grade and ninth grade had the same five clusters of racial socialization patterns: High Multifaceted, Black Navigation Capital, Low Multifaceted, Infrequent, and Moderate Multifaceted. I also used a series of analyses of variance (ANOVAs) in SPSS to conduct an examination of how adolescent gender, caregiver racial identity, family interracial contact, caregiver and adolescent reports of racial discrimination, and caregiver and adolescent reported quality of communication related to caregiver cluster membership. Findings indicate that racial centrality, experiences of racial discrimination, and quality of communication were predictive of caregiver racial socialization cluster membership, especially for caregivers with adolescents in the seventh and ninth grades. In the seventh and ninth grades, caregivers with the highest reports of racial centrality were members of the High Multifaceted cluster (i.e., above average score in Navigation Capital, BCI, and Racial Barrier messages). An important contribution of this dissertation is the exploration of how different types of racial discrimination experiences (i.e., Invisible/Outsider, Criminal, Harassment, Unintelligent, Other) could explain caregiver cluster membership. Racial discriminatory experiences of being treated like a criminal and harassed were particularly predictive of cluster membership. Caregivers in the seventh grade High Multifaceted cluster reported significantly more experiences of being treated like a criminal than caregivers in the seventh grade Egalitarian Navigation Capital cluster. In comparison to caregivers in the ninth grade Black Navigation Capital cluster, caregivers in the ninth grade High Multifaceted cluster also reported more experiences of being harassed, being treated as criminal, and being treated as if they were unintelligent. From a developmental perspective, my results suggest that a) caregivers move towards race salience racial socialization patterns (i.e., High Multifaceted Cluster) and away from patterns in which racial barrier messages are minimized (i.e., Black Navigation Capital Cluster) over time and b) substantial shifts in racial socialization patterns may happen before the transition to high school.