The purpose of this innovative working conference is to more deeply address cultural variations in research on parenting and socialization in diverse families. The working conference will provide the opportunity to present a number of collaborative research projects that begin to remedy gaps in the literature on diverse families and deepen the study of culture and parenting processes. The projects discussed at this conference will be developed from a cross-section of more than 20 existing data sets accessible to members of the Study Group on Race, Culture and Ethnicity (SGRCE), a diverse group of scholars who have collectively been working toward advancing research on family functioning and child development. The primary activity of the group will be to develop a series of studies/papers that share constructs within two main areas of study-- parenting and, ethnic identity and socialization. During the conference collaborators will present findings from the various studies conducted and discuss the convergence across data sets and cultures. Finally, plans will be made to fuse data sets based upon what we have learned from the research and presentations to guide future research. More broadly, the conference is meant 1) to further the development of a more in-depth and inclusive study of diverse families, which we are calling an excavation of culture; 2) to incorporate and embrace an approach to research on families of color that is responsive to policy and practice concerns; 3) to advance each particular set of joint analyses through consultation with expert statistical consultants; and 4) finally, to publish the resulting group of papers on these issues.
