Exploring urban students' constructions about school, work, race, and ethnicity

This qualitative study is an exploration of 32 urban high school students' narratives about the connection between school, work, and societal expectations of their future success related to their racial and ethnic background. The sample varied along 2 contextual dimensions: participation in a psychoeducational intervention (Tools for Tomorrow) and developmental status (i.e., half the sample were 9th-grade students and the other half were 12th-grade students). Using consensual qualitative research, the narratives revealed 3 major domains: future orientation; students' perceptions of society's expectations based on race and ethnicity; and students' perception of the role of their race and ethnicity in future success. Results reveal that the majority of students endorse a connection between school and work, believe that society holds low expectations for them based on their racial and ethnic background, and cannot predict their future success based on their background.     

Dynamics of identity development and separation–individuation in parent–child relationships during adolescence and emerging adulthood – A conceptual integration

Identity development and separation–individuation in parent–child relationships are widely perceived as related tasks of psychosocial maturation. However, a dynamic, developmental perspective that explains how intra-personal change in identity evolves from transactions between parents and children is not sufficiently represented in the literature. In this article, a selective literature review of psychological approaches to identity development and separation–individuation is presented with a focus on how the role of parents has been covered by approaches to identity development and on how general mechanisms of identity change could be filled with content by processes of separation–individuation. Afterwards, dynamics of identity development and separation–individuation are integrated based on the conceptualization of parents and children as two interrelated identity systems. Specifically, it is illustrated how interpersonal differences in long-term related changes in identity formation, identity evaluation, autonomy, and separateness and attachment between parents and children, could be explained by parent–child transactions in the transition between childhood and adolescence and between adolescence and emerging adulthood. Finally, implications of an integrative perspective for future empirical research are discussed.