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Racial Identity and Academic Achievement in the Neighborhood Context: A Multilevel Analysis

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Abstract

Increasingly, researchers have found relationships between a strong, positive sense of racial identity and academic achievement among African American youth. Less attention, however, has been given to the roles and functions of racial identity among youth experiencing different social and economic contexts. Using hierarchical linear modeling, the authors examined the relationship of racial identity to academic outcomes, taking into account neighborhood-level factors. The sample consisted of 564 African American eighth-graders (56% male). The authors found that neighborhood characteristics and racial identity related positively to academic outcomes, but that some relationships were different across neighborhood types. For instance, in neighborhoods low in economic opportunity, high pride was associated with a higher GPA, but in more advantaged neighborhoods, high pride was associated with a lower GPA. The authors discuss the need to take youth’s contexts into account in order to understand how racial identity is active in the lives of African American youth.

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Notes

  1. Recently, various racial identity scholars have asserted that racial identity and ethnic identity are similar constructs that often are referred to interchangeably (see review by Quintana (2007), for a discussion). For African Americans in particular, it has been suggested that it is difficult to distinguish and disentangle beliefs systems that might be considered “racial” from those considered “cultural”, due to the historical and structural forces related to race that have at least in part circumscribed African Americans’ development of beliefs systems, traditions, and practices (e.g., Miller and MacIntosh 1999). We choose to use the term “racial identity” in the present paper because we were interested in youth’s beliefs about their group in relation to its function and status as a racial group in society.

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Correspondence to Tabbye M. Chavous.

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Byrd, C.M., Chavous, T.M. Racial Identity and Academic Achievement in the Neighborhood Context: A Multilevel Analysis. J Youth Adolescence 38, 544–559 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-008-9381-9

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