The proposed study will investigate parental socialization processes related to the development of children's racial coping skills. For African Americans, daily living experiences and the stressful life event of other Americans are additionally encumbered by the chronic and mundan stressors associated with racism and discrimination (Pierce, 1975; 1990) Black families, painfully aware of the racial imbalance and their concomitant devalued status in the society, adjust their parenting practices to include socialization geared toward protecting their children and their psyches' from anticipated race prejudice and explicit discriminatory events. Three hypotheses will be considered. Hypothesis 1: Parental interactional processes (negotiation strategies, declaratives, questions imperatives, turn-taking, etc.) which facilitate and encourage child problem solving will be related to proactive racial coping in children. Hypothesis 2: Among parents where interactional process are not observed to be optimal, proactive racial coping among children will be mediated by other personality attributes or perceptions of the child, i.e., age, positive feeling of competence, good general coping skills, low school anxiety, perceived social support from other adults or peers. Hypothesi 3: Parental contextualization of non-specific conflict as racial conflic will be associated with the increased number of child racial coping strategies (RCS) articulated, while decontextualization or diminished racial meaning will result in fewer articulated RCS. Microanalysis of will examine videotaped sessions of 80 parent-child dyads regarding the race related socialization of African American children in grades 3-4 and 5-6. Children will be divided into two tasks conditions, in one condition stories with explicit racial content will be used, in the second similar stories devoid of racial content will be used. Independent variables, include the scored domains of interaction and contextualization or decontextualization of each story (tasks referred to above), the dependent variable is the child's racial coping strategies.
| Greenfield, Thomas K; Stoneking, Beth C; Humphreys, Keith et al. (2008) A randomized trial of a mental health consumer-managed alternative to civil commitment for acute psychiatric crisis. Am J Community Psychol 42:135-44 |
