Douglass Sara, Mirpuri Sheena, Yip Tiffany
T. Denny Sanford School of Family and Social Dynamics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA.
Fordham University, Bronx, NY, USA.
J Youth Adolesc. 2017 Feb;46(2):300-316. doi: 10.1007/s10964-016-0532-0. Epub 2016 Jul 27.
The importance of ethnicity/race for adolescents' identity (i.e., centrality), and how that importance changes over time, may in part be a function of the social contexts that they inhabit. Although centrality has shown to be an adaptive component of ethnic/racial identity, little is known about how centrality changes during adolescence in relation to these social contexts. The current study examined the role of same-ethnic/racial peers and friends in the longitudinal development of ethnic/racial identity centrality. Drawing on four waves of data over 2 years collected with a diverse sample of 350 adolescents (M = 15.2; 69 % female), the findings indicated that when adolescents had a greater proportion of same-ethnic/racial friends, they reported feeling that their ethnic/racial identity was more central to their sense of self six months later. However, this effect was strongest among adolescents with a low proportion of same-ethnic/racial peers in school, and weakest among adolescents with a high proportion of same-ethnic/racial peers in school. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the joint effects of peer and friend diversity in relation to ethnic/racial identity are discussed.
种族/民族对青少年身份认同（即核心地位）的重要性，以及这种重要性如何随时间变化，可能部分取决于他们所处的社会环境。尽管核心地位已被证明是种族/民族身份认同的一个适应性组成部分，但对于青少年时期核心地位如何随这些社会环境而变化，我们却知之甚少。当前的研究考察了同种族/民族的同龄人及朋友在种族/民族身份认同核心地位的纵向发展过程中所起的作用。利用对350名青少年（平均年龄M = 15.2岁；69%为女性）的多样化样本在两年内收集的四组数据，研究结果表明，当青少年拥有更高比例的同种族/民族朋友时，他们在六个月后报告称，感觉自己的种族/民族身份对自我认知更为核心。然而，这种影响在学校中同种族/民族同龄人比例较低的青少年中最为明显，而在学校中同种族/民族同龄人比例较高的青少年中则最为微弱。本文讨论了这些研究结果对于我们理解同龄人及朋友多样性与种族/民族身份认同之间的共同影响的意义。
