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28-02-2024 | Empirical Research

Teachers’ Implementation of the Identity Project Is Associated With Increases in U.S. High School Students’ Ethnic-Racial Identity Exploration

Auteurs: Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor, Michael R. Sladek, M. Dalal Safa

Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Youth and Adolescence

Abstract

Ethnic-racial identity formation has significant consequences for positive youth development. Existing findings support the efficacy of the Identity Project, a school-based ethnic-racial identity intervention, when delivered by researchers; however, effectiveness of the program when delivered by teachers is unknown. This study examined changes in adolescents’ (N = 180; 42.2% male, 50.6% female, 6.7% another gender identity; M_age = 14.11, SD = 0.33; 38.3% Latinx, 33.9% White, 15.0% Black, 9.4% Asian American, 3.3% another ethnoracial background) ethnic-racial identity exploration as a function of their teachers’ implementation of the Identity Project. Findings indicated that ethnic-racial identity exploration significantly increased from pretest to posttest, and this did not vary based on familial ethnic-racial socialization, student-teacher ethnoracial match/mismatch, gender, immigrant status, or ethnoracial background. This study provides preliminary evidence that U.S. educators can be trained to efficaciously implement the Identity Project with high school students and, furthermore, that this approach to program dissemination may not only facilitate scale-up but also result in greater gains for adolescents relative to research-led implementations.

The term ethnic-racial is used throughout this article to acknowledge the intersecting nature of ethnicity and race in the psychological process of forming an identity based on individuals’ sometimes-overlapping lived experiences that are shaped by their ethnic and racial group memberships (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014). In addition, the term ethnic-racial is used to acknowledge the experiences of individuals belonging to social identity groups that have been socially constructed as ‘ethnic’ (i.e., Latinx/Hispanic; Humes et al., 2011), but whose lived experiences reflect a racialized othering effect (Massey, 2014).

Although the Identity Project consists of 8 sessions that are delivered once per week, implementation took place over a 10-week period because of two non-consecutive school holiday weeks that interrupted the weekly implementation. Thus, pretest was administered in Week 1, Identity Project sessions were delivered during Weeks 2 through 11, and the posttest was administered in Week 12.

The response option was “Latino or Hispanic (for example: Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Colombian, etc.);” however, the term Latinx is used in the current article to promote terminology that recognizes gender as non-binary.

The mean of T1 family ethnic socialization was set to zero, given that the variable was centered and thus the mean was already equal to zero. Applying this constraint to the fully saturated model allowed for 1 df for these nested model comparisons.

To ensure accurate effect size comparisons for researcher-led implementations, which were based on experimental designs and therefore included comparison to a control group, Hedge’s g (equivalent to Cohen’s d for samples greater than 20) was calculated for the two prior published studies and the current study with pre- and post-test means only considering youth in the intervention group (i.e., repeated measures); see Morris and DeShon (2002) for a review of effect size equivalence considerations. Thus, the effect sizes reported here differ slightly from effect sizes reported in Ceccon et al. (2023) and Umaña-Taylor, Douglass et al. (2018), which were based on experimental results comparing intervention and control group differences.

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Titel: Teachers’ Implementation of the Identity Project Is Associated With Increases in U.S. High School Students’ Ethnic-Racial Identity Exploration
Auteurs: Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor
Michael R. Sladek
M. Dalal Safa
Publicatiedatum: 28-02-2024
Uitgeverij: Springer US
Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Youth and Adolescence
Print ISSN: 0047-2891
Elektronisch ISSN: 1573-6601
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-024-01955-2

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