Implications of Racial Self-Identification, Racial Ancestry, and Racial Context for Depressive Symptoms, Achievement, and Self-Esteem Among Multiracial Adolescents |
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Montreal Convention Center
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2006-08-11
32 pages
Melissa Herman, Assistant Professor, Sociology
Dartmouth University
This paper describes the impact of racial self-identification, racial ancestry, and racial composition of contexts on measures of depressive symptoms, achievement, and self-esteem among 1,417 multiracial youth and 7,310 monoracial youth ages 14-19. Comparisons are made both between multi- and monoracial groups, and within groups of multiracial respondents who self-identify in different single-race categories. Results show that racial ancestry, self-identification, and context are significantly related to these developmental outcomes. For multiracial youth, self-identifying as Black or Hispanic is associated with lower grades while simply having Black ancestry (regardless of self-identification) is not. Net of other factors, neither ancestry nor identification appear to have a significant impact on depressive symptoms among monoracial students but they have a significant impact for multi-racial part-Blacks and part-Hispanics. Racial context showed a significant impact only for neighborhood: the lower percentage of whites in a multiracial youth’s neighborhood, the lower his or her grades.
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Tags: American Sociological Association, Melissa Herman, Melissa R. Herman