The Development of Identities in Cultural Environments (DICE) Lab conducts research on the development of identities and intersectionality among children and adolescents in diverse cultural environments. Our current and ongoing projects explore research-related questions such as:
How do children understand what it means to be White, to be a boy, to be Black girl? How do adolescents make sense of racial and gender stereotypes, and can we help them to resist or challenge these stereotypes? Where does intersectionality show up in youth’s identity narratives and experiences? What are the consequences of youth identities for their psychosocial outcomes, academic pathways, and actions for justice?
“Black Girl Magic”: The Social and Academic Lives of Black Girls
How do cultural narratives such as #BGM shape the ways in which Black girls cultivate a sense of agency and humanity in the face of racist and sexist stereotypes? How do Black adolescent girls resist and engage with conflicting narratives surrounding Black girlhood and womanhood? The BGM study delves into the intersectional space of Black girlhood in order to understand how Black girls navigate these conflicting messages, and in turn make sense of their own identities. The BGM study focuses on the experiences and perspectives of Black girls, and the ways in which they assert a sense of self and individuality in their social, academic, and personal lives.
Rebuilding Black Girlhood!
Rebuilding Black Girlhood! (RBG!) is a community-research partnership between Gloria Dotson-Lewis, MSW, licensed social worker and founder of Distinctively Me, and Onnie Rogers, PhD, professor and developmental psychologist. In 2019, they established RBG! with a community-based advisory board that aims to nurture the development and well-being of Black girls during the critical teenage years (12-18). RBG! recognizes the multifaceted structural and ideological factors at work in sustaining Black girls’ marginalization and targets a proximal lever in this complex system: the personhood of Black girls. Teen TEE is our curriculum project, a 10-week program that creates space for Black girls to build identities and relationships and strengthen their support networks to navigate, resist and dismantle structures of oppression and inequality.
On Parenting About Racism
The multifaceted economic, health, and logistical challenges of COVID-19 have revealed and revitalized racial inequality in the United States. When George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed by Minneapolis police in May 2020, the response was global – with protests and rallies worldwide. The online and on-the-ground action continues, with initiatives to defund the police. In the midst of this global reckoning with race and racism, parents are faced with new information (from media, news, families, and friends) and expectations about race and their role in teaching their own children about race. How are parents responding to this shifting racial and sociopolitical moment? How are parents transmitting racial knowledge and negotiating race conversations in this unprecedented time? On Parenting About Racism (On PAR) study aims to answer these questions by examining how Black and white parents in the United States are talking about race with their 8-11-year-old children and the developmental, psychosocial, and sociopolitical factors that may explain patterns in who and how parents talk about race during this important developmental period.
Beyond Black & White: What Does Mutiracial Identity Mean in Moments of Racial Unrest?
The murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked racial protests and unrest across the world. In America, what does it mean to Black and White in a country that still reinforces the racial binary? How are multiracial folks navigating the heightened national discourse around Black Lives Matter, the reckoning with white privilege, and action to dismantle systemic racism? In what ways have multiracial folks responded and reflected on their own identities during this sociopolitical moment?
The Beyond Black and White Project is a mixed-methods study that examines the racial identities, racial socialization messages, activism, and mental health of multiracial and monoracial Black Americans in this social context.
“They are trying to say I’m not, I’m not Black when I am”: Multiracial youth making sense of their racial identity
What does it mean to be multiracial? How do youth who identify with multiple racial groups make sense of the messages they receive about race and racial discrimination they face? This line of analysis centers the voices and experiences of children and adolescents with multiracial backgrounds from middle childhood through middle adolescence. Across multiple data sets, young people’s narratives underscore the role that messages from others play in the way that they talk about who they are, especially as they move from childhood and into adolescence. We focus on the roles of age and gender, and understanding how the multiracial identities of youth fit with existing literature of (mono)racial identity development.
The College Story: Race and Identity on Campus
How do college students understand the role of race in their college experience? How do they choose to tell their story, who and what do they include in the story? How do they make sense of racism and its effect on their belonging, academic experiences, and interactions with the institution?
The College Story project is a life-story, narrative identity approach to exploring how Black and Latinx students tell the story of the college years through the lens of race. We explore their narratives through a series of life-story activities that aim to shed light on their own developing racial identities and social and academic experiences during the college years.
Racial Identity Development among White Youth
What does it mean to be White? When and why do White children and early adolescents recognize racism, white privilege and their positionality within a racist system? Although research on ethnic-racial identity among youth of color has seen an overdue expansion in past decades, a parallel examination of White youth has not occurred, reinforcing the narrative that whiteness is “normal”. Janet Helms’s seminal White Racial Identity Development (WRID) model articulates a compelling developmental framework for understanding how White individuals come to reckon with whiteness and can establish a positive, anti-racist racial identity. This project examines the utility of the WRID model as an organizational framework to analyze the negotiation of racial identity among White youth.
Gender and Race: Genderqueer and Non-binary Experiences
Increasing acceptance of gender diversity as a normal human variation has paved the way for research that centers the experiences of people who do not identify with the sex and/or gender they were assigned at birth. However, within the category of marginalized genders, there are still populations who remain largely excluded from research. Genderqueer and non-binary (GQNB) populations are an especially understudied group relative to binary transgender people. This study identifies the specific experiences of GQNB people of varying racial/ethnic groups in an effort to co-construct knowledge about the expectations and stereotypes navigated by these individuals. An intersectional master narrative approach will highlight the complexities of the expectations and stereotypes experienced by racially/ethnically diverse GQNB people, bringing in a component of heterogeneity among GQNB people that is lacking in the current literature.
Racial Identity in the Context of Black Lives Matter
How has the Black Lives Matter Movement impacted children’s developing racial identities? Has race become more important to how children think about themselves? Does the content of children’s racial narratives change in manners that reflect the Black Lives Matter movement? DICE explores how macro-cultural shifts in racial dialogue and events might interact with and inform the micro-level of children’s emerging racial identities.
Politics, Activism, and Identity
How young people make sense of and engage with the sociopolitical climate may have lasting developmental implications. How are young adults experiencing the fraught and tumultuous sociopolitical climate in the United States? How do the intersections of racism and sexism privilege some people while harming others? Who do young adults talk to, how do they process these events, why and how do they participate in the political process? What are psychological consequences for their mental health, racial and gender identities, and civic participation?
Bridging research on political activism, critical consciousness, and identity development, the Politics, Activism, and Identity study uses a mixed-methods design to gather real-time, contextualized data on crucial issues that frame young adulthood, including racial and gender identity, awareness of and resistance to social inequality, and civic engagement.
Naming and Resisting Master Narratives
Gendered Identities and Stereotypes of Emotions among Black, White, and Latinx Girls
How do girls use gendered stereotypes on emotions in their understanding of what it means to be a girl? Do girls resist or accommodate these stereotypes trivializing and penalizing their emotional expression? This senior thesis project utilizes an intersectional lens to explore how Black, White, and Latinx adolescent girls spontaneously link emotionality and their racialized gender identities, while also exploring how their framing of emotion management contributes to their psychological well-being.
Black Youth’s Perceptions of Marginalized Sexualities
Stereotypes of Blackness, masculinity, and heteronormativity are tightly threaded in American culture. Do Black youth spontaneously discuss sexuality when describing their own racial and gender identities?
This senior thesis project explores Black youth’s discussions and perceptions of marginalized sexualities in the context of their own racial and gender identities. Using in-depth interviews with Black students from single-gender high schools, we assess how frequently and why Black youth discuss sexuality, with an eye toward the ways in which their discussions of minoritized sexualities accommodate to and resist master narratives of heteronormativity.
iLit: “Intersectionality Literature”
How is psychology currently operationalizing the intersectionality framework within methodology? How effective is that application in capturing the intersectional experience of identity? In which ways does intersectional identity research disrupt the status quo of mainstream psychology?
DICE’s iLit project explores these questions through examining existing empirical literature on identity that claims to use the intersectionality framework in its methodology.
Children’s Faith Identity Development
Faith, understood broadly to include spirituality and religion for the purpose of this project, remains an understudied topic in developmental theory and research in U.S. Yet, faith could be seen as an aspect of social identity – the understanding of self in relation to others and society. Can psychosocial identity and social identity theories be used to conceptualize faith as a component of children’s social identity development? Do children view faith as a relevant to their own developing sense of identity, and if so, how does it fit with their race and gender identities? What are the consequences of faith identity for children’s socioemotional capacities, such as empathy, intergroup relations, morality, equity and justice? In this interdisciplinary working group, we are examining these questions and the methodological challenges and opportunities of pursuing this line of research within developmental science.