Bio:
Adam is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology working with Deborah Rivas-Drake. He received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in August 2017. His research investigates how socializing agents impact the development of social identities during adolescence and how interventions can be developed to shape identities to be congruent with a more positive sense of self and academic success.



Abstract:
Identity development represents one of the primary social developmental tasks of adolescence and has constantly been shown to be associated with and even predict many important outcomes in the lives of adolescents. This talk will detail the findings from three different studies that investigate factors that shape social identities and their associations with outcomes. The first study explores the role of mothers in the development of ethnic-racial identity (ERI) among adolescents. Estimation of longitudinal, bidirectional influence between African American mothers and adolescents was assessed as youth aged from Grade 5 to Grade 12. The second study sought to better understand the relation between ERI and academic outcomes through assessing how valuing of school could act as mediating mechanism in longitudinal relations of ERI and academic motivation among North African French adolescents. Lastly, the third study was an intervention study. Some ethnic/racial and gender groups are negatively stereotyped in academic domains, thus academic success is likely not considered to be a characteristic of an in-group member or congruent with a social identity. To thwart these negative stereotypes and to make academic success congruent with ethnic-racial and gender identities, an intervention was developed with the use of role models and a self-affirmation task with American Indian adolescents.