Kaylynn Young
Research Mentor(s): Deborah Rivas-Drake
Mentor Department:
Authors: KayLynn Young, Summer Xiong, Victoria Vezaldenos
Session: Session 5 (2:00pm – 2:50pm)
Presentation Type: Poster 19
Abstract
Multiracial individuals, anyone with biological parents of two or more different racial backgrounds, are the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group in the U.S. (U.S Census Bureau, 2021). Multiracial youth grow up in systems that privilege people with exactly one racial background. Thus, they often develop an awareness of both their racial identity and systemic racism as they navigate such contexts and may become motivated to challenge these monoracist structures. Yet despite this, little research examines how Multiracial adolescents navigate racial identity development and come to understand systemic oppression simultaneously. Because of this, our primary aim is to develop a scale that will assess Critical Multiracial Ethnic-Racial Identity (CMERI). The CMERI Project is a mixed methods study following best practices for measured development (Boateng et. al, 2018). Thus far we have conducted 6 focus groups with a diverse group of Multiracial adult participants from 11 unique ERI’s ages 18-25. We are currently aiming to conduct three youth focus groups by May 2025. The primary aim of these focus groups is to better understand how Multiracial young people interpret their identities, reflect on their lived experiences, and approach social justice issues. Emerging analyses of this focus group data has produced a codebook with both inductive and deductive coding allowing us to identify common themes. Inductive codes were generated by collaboratively identifying common patterns within participant responses into brief code words or phrases. Our team split up transcripts, reviewed excerpts, generated novel codes, and met to discuss similarities in our notes to finalize the content of our working codebook. These codes will then be used to systematically review future focus group data. Emerging patterns suggest that racial identity formation is influenced by factors such as media, physical traits, cultural environment, and family. These results will enable development of survey questions based on the commonalities observed in the focus group data. The survey will then be administered to a larger sample, ultimately contributing to the creation of a scale to measure CMERI. Our measure will be an important and necessary addition to this field and will aid scholars in better understanding the Multiracial experience and how this growing population can play an active role in social justice movements.
