In this proposal, we request 5 years of continued funding to extend our findings on the contextual processes associated with academic competence, social competence, and psychological adjustment among rural African American youths from predominantly single-parent households. We propose to extend this work in a programmatic manner by collecting four additional waves of data, enabling us to address unanswered questions concerning the mechanisms that promote competence among rural African American youths as they move through adolescence and high school. By working closely with members of the communities in which the participants reside, we have retained 93 percent of the 170 families originally recruited in 1993 when this project was funded. The participating families live in small towns and communities in rural Georgia in which poverty rates are among the highest in the nation and unemployment rates are above the national average. Although 75 percent of the mothers in this sample are employed, 68 percent of the families live below federal poverty standards and the remaining 32 percent live within 150 percent of the poverty threshold. Many of these families thus live under conditions of severe, chronic environmental risks that have the potential to take a toll on their children. These children, however, demonstrate great resilience, maturing into healthy, competent youths despite the stressors with which they live. Our research program has been geared toward identification of the normative family processes that are linked with these children's development of competence. In the proposed continuation, we will continue to focus on the identification of normative family processes, including extended family care giving relationships, that forecast these children's development of competence. We will also examine the contributions that friendships, classroom processes, and the contextual stressor of racism make to youth development. To examine the study hypotheses, we propose a longitudinal, multi-informant design that includes reports from mothers and extended family caregivers, the youths, their friends, and their teachers. At each wave of data collection, home visits will be made to the participating families and to two friends of each participating target youth. Three teachers of each youth will report on their classroom practices.
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