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Considering Friends Within the Context of Peers in School for the Development of Ethnic/Racial Identity

  • Empirical Research
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Abstract

The importance of ethnicity/race for adolescents’ identity (i.e., centrality), and how that importance changes over time, may in part be a function of the social contexts that they inhabit. Although centrality has shown to be an adaptive component of ethnic/racial identity, little is known about how centrality changes during adolescence in relation to these social contexts. The current study examined the role of same-ethnic/racial peers and friends in the longitudinal development of ethnic/racial identity centrality. Drawing on four waves of data over 2 years collected with a diverse sample of 350 adolescents (M age at W1 = 15.2; 69 % female), the findings indicated that when adolescents had a greater proportion of same-ethnic/racial friends, they reported feeling that their ethnic/racial identity was more central to their sense of self six months later. However, this effect was strongest among adolescents with a low proportion of same-ethnic/racial peers in school, and weakest among adolescents with a high proportion of same-ethnic/racial peers in school. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the joint effects of peer and friend diversity in relation to ethnic/racial identity are discussed.

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Notes

  1. This covariate was included to account for possible differences based on societal status. This approach was more statistically powerful than separating each ethnic/racial group in the sample, and was more parsimonious since we did not have expectations about specific differences between ethnic/racial minority groups.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant awarded to the third author and Dr. J. Nicole Shelton of Princeton University from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (1 R01 HD055436).

Authors’ Contributions

SD participated in the study’s conception and design, conducted the analyses, and led the drafting of the manuscript. SM participated in the interpretation of the data and helped draft the manuscript. TY designed the larger study from which data were drawn, participated in the conception and interpretation of the data, and provided feedback on the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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  1. T. Denny Sanford School of Family and Social Dynamics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Sara Douglass

  2. Fordham University, Bronx, NY, USA

    Sheena Mirpuri & Tiffany Yip

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  1. Sara Douglass
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  2. Sheena Mirpuri
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Correspondence to Sara Douglass.

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All procedures for the current study were approved by the Institutional Review Boards of Fordham University, Princeton University, and the New York City Department of Education.

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Active parental consent was sought for participants in the current study, who were under the age of 18. Additionally, signed assent was obtained for all participants.

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Douglass, S., Mirpuri, S. & Yip, T. Considering Friends Within the Context of Peers in School for the Development of Ethnic/Racial Identity. J Youth Adolescence 46, 300–316 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0532-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0532-0

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