Sociocultural Risks and Assets Predicting Academic Competence & College-Going Efficacy Among Black and Latino Adolescents

• In Event: 3-172 - Online Discrimination and Adolescent Development: Better Understanding Mechanisms of Influence and Opportunities for Intervention

Integrative Statement

Presently adolescents are engaging with online platforms more than previous generations. As adolescents’ online presence increases, it is worth examining how Black and Latino students are experiencing racial discrimination on online platforms and how this may influence their current and future attitudes. Existing research on adolescents’ experiences of discrimination in an online context suggests stereotypes and racial victimization affect adolescents’ academic and psychological adjustment (Tynes, 2008; Umana-Taylor, 2014). Further, researchers have examined protective factors such as racial/ethnic identity and self-esteem to gain further insights into how students cope with online racial discrimination (Tynes et. al, 2012). To date, self-worth has not been studied as a personal asset that buffers the negative impacts of online racial discrimination on adolescents’ perceptions of their current and future academic selves. This study aimed to understand how online discrimination (sociocultural risk) and racial identity and self-worth (protective factors) predict academic competence and college-going efficacy for Black and Latino adolescents. We hypothesized that online racial discrimination would be related to lower perceived academic competence and less college-going efficacy. We also expected that self-worth would mitigate the negative effect of online discrimination on adolescent academic outcomes. Data were collected in 2018 from middle and high school students participating in a summer academy in the southeast United States. Of the 154 participants, 91 identified as Latino and 63 as Black. Students completed measures on racial centrality and private regard (tailored to their racial/ethnic group; Sellers et al., 1997), online racial discrimination (Tynes et al., 2010), academic competence, global self-worth, and college-going efficacy (Gibbons & Borders, 2010). We conducted a path analysis to examine the relationship between online discrimination and academic competence and college-going efficacy, with age and gender as control variables. We included racial identity and self-worth as moderators (i.e., testing direct effects and interaction terms). Our pattern of findings suggested that online discrimination exposure was associated with more negative academic outcomes while self-worth and private regard were directly associated with more positive academic outcomes. Findings also indicated that self-worth moderated the association between online discrimination and academic competence such that online racial discrimination was negatively associated with academic competence when a student reported lower perceptions of gobal self-worth but this pattern did not emerge among youth holding higher perceptions of global self-worth. These findings suggest that both global and race-specific sense of self may be important contributors to positive academic attitudes among Black and Latino adolescents experiencing online racial discrimination. Further, self-worth may function as a meaningful protective factor in that it appears to diminish the harmful effects of online racial discrimination on academic competence. Implications for supporting racially marginalized adolescents who experience online racial discrimination will be discussed.

Authors

• Briana Green, North Carolina State Universty
  Presenting Author

• Elan Hope, North Carolina State University
  Non-Presenting Author