| Children of immigrants are a rapidly growing US subpopulation; it is estimated that 1 in 5 school children are from immigrant families. Recent research suggests that forming positive ethnic identities helps promote academic achievement and healthy psychosocial outcomes among bicultural youth. However, despite its importance, our understanding of ethnic identity development is limited. Three studies are presented here to advance our understanding of bicultural students' ethnic identity development during middle childhood and adolescence. Guiding questions included: (1) Do ethnic identities develop prior to adolescence among children of immigrants? If so, how do children characterize their ethnic identities, and are these qualities correlated with ethnic ingroup/outgroup peer social preferences? (2) Can ethnic identities be measured implicitly? How can these social cognitive insights inform theories of ethnic identity development? (3) What roles might affective regulation play in shaping bicultural students' representations of their ethnic identities?;Participants included over 300 children of immigrants (6-12 years), and 84 ethnically and racially diverse adolescents (13-20 years); several noteworthy findings emerged in this mixed-methods study. First, children of Cambodian, Dominican and Portuguese families showed strong evidence of ethnic identity exploration. Ethnic identities were stable over time, and correlated with social preferences: children, regardless of ethnic background, preferred playing with children of both ingroup and outgroup ethnic/racial members if they reported positive ethnic identities. Second, during a novel response-time cognitive task, the Bicultural Implicit Processing Task (BIPT), bicultural adolescents not only showed facilitated responses to self-descriptive ethnic/racial labels, but also responded relatively slowly to the word "white" when asked if it was "like them" or "not like them." Further, bicultural adolescents who were slow to respond to the word "white" in the BIPT showed increased heart rates while discussing their identities during an interview. Qualitative analyses revealed that these adolescents represented their ethnic identities with insecurity and confusion.;Taken together, the findings throughout this research support a growing consensus that ethnic identity development is an essential part of 'being bicultural.' Future studies with bicultural youth should consider both the qualities of identifications with ethnic 'ingroups,' as well as qualities of identifications with the "white" racial group. |
