The Relation between Prosocial Behavior and Emerging Adults’ Belongingness Across Gender and Ethnic Racial Identities

• In Event: Diverse prosocial behavior and the correlates: Contextualized examinations from childhood to young adulthood

Abstract

Humans long to belong. It is important to consider the contextualized experiences of individuals when examining belongingness. Given the sociohistorical context of the U.S., people in minority groups share the experience of marginalization and being treated as “the other” even though each minority group is stereotyped and oppressed in different ways. In this work, we took an intersectional approach and simultaneously considered two central social position variables: gender and race. Specifically, young adults were classified based on the number of minority statuses (0, 1, or 2). We expected that groups with more minority statuses would have a lower sense of belongingness than the group with no minority status. In addition, we examined the promotive role of global prosocial behavior in relation to belongingness and how this relation is moderated by gender and race. Specifically, prosocial behavior likely promotes belongingness more strongly for members of marginalized groups than those in majority groups.
We will also investigate different targets of prosocial behavior in further analyses. Participants were 1163 emerging adults aged 18 to 24 (63.3% female, 50.7% Whites, 19.6% Hispanic/Latino, 2.3% Black, 24% Asian, .3% Native American, 3% Others) from a Southwestern university in the United States. Young adults reported their prosocial behavior and belongingness. Specifically, prosocial behavior was operationalized as the amount of time and effort young adults have used to help or work with eight targets at the university within the past 12 months. The targets were ingroup and outgroup members based on age, gender, race/ethnicity, and department/unit. Belongingness to the university was measured with 9-item Identification with a Psychology Group questionnaire (IDPG; Mael & Tetrick, 1992).
Overall, 15.7% of the participants had majority status in both gender and race (i.e., White Male), 53.7% had one minority identity in either gender or race (e.g., White female), and 30.5% belong to both gender and race minority groups (e.g., Black female). Surprisingly, young adults of different gender and race/ethnicity statuses did not differ in their belongingness to the university although individuals with majority statuses in both gender and race were significantly less prosocial than the other two groups. Preliminary analyses controlling for education and professional position indicated a positive relation between global prosocial behavior and the belongingness (b = .01, p < .001). Multiple group analyses indicated prosocial behavior was most strongly related to belongingness for the group with both minority statuses than the other two groups although they do not differ significantly.
These initial findings provide a meaningful first step of understanding socioemotional well-being among young adults by considering multiple social identities and statuses. Consistent with prior work, we found a positive relation between prosocial behavior and belongingness although it was intriguing that this relation did not differ significantly by group memberships. However, these relations could differ when considering the targets of prosocial behavior. We
will discuss further analyses including differentiating young adults’ prosocial behavior toward various ingroup and outgroup members, and the consideration of specific group memberships (e.g., Black, Asian, gender non-binary) beyond the current broad categorization of minority/majority status.

Authors

• Qinxin Shi, University of Utah
  Presenting Author

• Sonya Xinyue Xiao, Northern Arizona Univeristy
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jeffrey Liew, Texas A&M University - College Station
  Non-Presenting Author