Racial discrimination and ethnic identity in Latina/o youth

The Chronicle of Evidenced Based Mentoring, May 28, 2015


"Ali Mroczkowski, my student, and I recently published a study on the roles of adult racial discrimination and ethnic identity in Latina/o youth’s perception of the economic value of education (Mroczkowski & Sánchez, 2015). The youth in our study were high school students who were mostly from ethnically homogenous communities and schools. Thus, there might not have been much opportunity to experience racial discrimination from adults, and as such, students generally reported no to little racial discrimination from adults. However, even experiencing just a little discrimination was enough to be related to lower perceptions of the economic value of education. The more racial discrimination that youth reported in 9th grade, the less they perceived in 10th grade that earning an education would pay off economically. In fact, we found that this relationship was only supported for the male students in our study. It seems that Latino male students are more sensitive to the negative effects of racial discrimination on their values and attitudes toward education.

But we found that ethnic identity can play a protective role in the negative effects of racial discrimination. A stronger ethnic identity weakened the negative effect of racial discrimination on male students’ perception of the economic value of education.” Read more

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