How will racial divisions in student friendship networks change as U.S. schools incorporate a growing Asian and Hispanic population? Drawing on theories of race in assimilation processes and the effects of relative group size on intergroup relations, several hypotheses are developed to address this question. These hypotheses are tested using data on friendships among students in grades 7 to 12 from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Key findings are that (1) cross-race friendships including Asian and Hispanic students are more common than those between white and black students, but race and Hispanic background have significant influences on student friendships that persist over immigrant generations; (2) black or white racial identifications are strongly associated with the friendship choices of Hispanic students: {3) cross-race friendships increase with school racial diversity: and (4) own-group friend selection intensifies for students in small racial minorities in a school. The results support theories of racially segmented patterns of assimilation in primary group relations and suggest that .students in small racial minorities seek to tnaintain a friendship network including several own-race friends. Implications are discussed. A LTHOUGH statements to the court in Brown v. Board of Education proposed desegregation as a policy to increase the achievement and self-esteem of hlack children, contemporary discussions focus more on fostering improved racial relations and reducing minority exclusion as major rationales for desegregation (Wells and Crain 1994). Central to these goals is the proposition that racially desegregated schooling will tend to generate cooperative, equal-status contact across racial lines
M ost research on "race" measures race using a respondent's self-identification. As researchers, we commonly use this measure as a proxy for many things, including an individual's racial identity and how an individual is perceived by others. But this entails a fundamentally flawed assumption: that individuals' self-identification consistently matches how others perceive them. In reality, our perceptions of others are unquestionably biased by our own characteristics (Harris 2002;Hill 2002). Moreover, given the demographic trends today toward greater multiracial identification and racial and ethnic heterogeneity, there is good reason to expect increasing mismatch between selfidentification and the perceptions of others. What are the social-psychological consequences of being perceived by others as part of a different racial group than the group one claims for one's self? We investigate this question for one racial group that has high rates of mismatch between self-identification and others' perceptions: American Indians. 1 Given the importance We hypothesize that individuals who self-identify with one racial group but are routinely perceived by observers as "looking like" another racial group may experience negative outcomes associated with this stressful situation. Since American Indians experience very high rates of misclassification, we use them as our case in point. Drawing from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, our analyses compare young American Indian adults who are perceived as another race by an observer to those who are correctly classified, using several indicators of psychological distress: depression, suicidal thoughts, use of psychological counseling services, suicide attempts, and fatalism. We also investigate differences in racial attitudes and behaviors, such as belonging to an ethnic solidarity organization or believing it is important to have a committed relationship with someone of the same race. The evidence suggests that, on the whole, misclassified American Indians have higher rates of psychological distress. We conclude by discussing our findings and their wider implications, especially in the context of an increasingly heterogeneous and multiracial society.
We used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the social and psychological well‐being of multiracial adolescents. Using two different measures of multiracial identity, we investigated the ways in which these adolescents compare to their monoracial counterparts on five outcomes: depression, seriously considering suicide, feeling socially accepted, feeling close to others at school, and participating in extracurricular activities. We found that multiracial adolescents as a group experience some negative outcomes compared to white adolescents, but that this finding is driven by negative outcomes for those with American Indian and white heritage. We found no consistent evidence, however, that multiracial adolescents as a group face more difficulty in adolescence than members of other racial and ethnic minority groups. The results were similar, whether the multiracial population is defined by self‐identification or by their parents’ racial identifications.
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