Perceived Racial Discrimination as a Barrier to College Enrolment for African

Americans

The title of the article I have read was Perceived Racial Discrimination as a
Barrier to College Enrolment for African Americans; it is about the American Africans that
struggling from racial discrimination in United States. African Americans trail European
Americans in terms of academic achievement, even when accounting for differences in
socioeconomic status. One cause of this gap may be racial discrimination. Despite more
than 100 years of progress toward equality in the education system, however, a significant
gap still exists in the United States between African Americans and European Americans
in terms of academic achievement. According to the National Center for Education
Statistics, African Americans are less likely than European Americans to earn a high school
degree or General Educational Development equivalent (87.5% vs. 93.7%) or a bachelors
degree (20.4% vs. 37.1%). Early explanations for this disparity centered on racial
differences in socioeconomic status, as African Americans are more likely than European
Americans to live in poverty and attend impoverished schools. The academic gap,
however, is reduced but not eliminated when SES is taken into account. Such findings
have led researchers to examine other psychosocial influences on academic achievement.
In the current study, we examined whether the racial disparity in education may be
explained by perceived racial discrimination and its influence on academic orientation,
educational aspirations, educational expectations, and deviance tolerance. They were
saying that for students to achieve academic success they need a positive academic
orientation, meaning that their global self-esteem must be partly contingent on their
academic outcomes. if academic success does not engender positive affect (and academic
failure, negative affect), students will become less motivated to perform in school thats
what they thought to happen to African Americans.


The authors did the research because they are interested in identifying the factors
that might buffer the deleterious effect of discrimination on academic outcomes. Future
orientation, an individual difference that captures youths propensity to think about and
plan for the future may be relevant because the educational system often asks students to
forego immediate pleasures to achieve long-term goals, such as college enrolment.

Data were collected as part of the Family and Community Health Study (FACHS), an
ongoing prospective study of psychosocial factors related to the mental and physical
health of African Americans. Participants came from an original panel of 889 African
American families, half from Iowa and half from Georgia. Each family had a 5th-grade
adolescent at recruitment who self-identified as African American or Black, and a primary
caregiver (parent), defined as an adult living in the same household as the adolescent who
was primarily responsible for his or her care. For the current study, 750 adolescents (390
from Iowa and 360 from Georgia) completed all relevant items across four waves of data
collection and were included in the structural equation models (SEMs). Families were
recruited from 259 block group areas in Iowa and Georgia. Sites included rural
communities, suburbs, and small metropolitan areas. Community coordinators and school
liaisons compiled lists of all families in the area that included a 5th-grade African
American child. Potential participant families were chosen randomly from these lists, and
complete data were gathered from 72% of the families on the recruitment lists. Those who
declined to participate almost always cited the amount of time the interview took (up to 3
hr per visit) as the reason. Written informed consent was obtained and families received
compensation for their participation ($70-$125 per wave for adolescents, $100-$125 per
wave for parents). Data were collected when adolescents were in 5th grade (M age = 10.5
years), 7th grade (M age = 12.5 years), 10th grade (M age = 15.5 years), and shortly after
high school (M age = 18.5 years). Among parents, 18.7% did not finish high school, 41.3%
earned a high school diploma only, 30.4% attended vocational.
These results demonstrated that early discrimination (5th grade) negatively
predicted college enrollment 8 years later, mediated by change in adolescents academic
orientation from 7th grade to 10th grade. Two mechanisms explained this change: (a)
discrimination promoted deviance tolerance, leading to decreased academic orientation,
and (b) discrimination eroded expectations to attend college, which indirectly predicted a
lower likelihood of college enrollment via decreased academic orientation, as well as
directly predicted it. The effect of discrimination on change in expectations was,
however, moderated by future orientation, such that experiences with discrimination
eroded expectations for adolescents low in future orientation, whereas those high in
future orientation unexpectedly reported an increase in their expectations in response to
discrimination. Importantly, the model controlled for SES, which included both family
income and mothers level of education (correlation between income and college
enrollment: r = .33, p < .001; correlation between parental education and college
enrollment: r = .27, p < .001), demonstrating that discrimination is an independent risk
factor. In addition, we controlled for adolescentsrisk-taking tendency, providing evidence
that this relation should not be attributed to an underlying personality trait that is
associated with poor academic outcomes and more experience with discrimination.

The Researchers found evidence that discrimination predicts an erosion of
academic expectations, which then predicts decreased academic orientation and a lower
likelihood of college enrollment. Interestingly, the effect of discrimination on change in
academic orientation occurred through 10th-grade expectations and not earlier
expectations, demonstrating that this effect manifested over time. They found no
evidence, however, that discrimination is related to academic aspirations. These results
support the argument that aspirations are abstract and therefore less likely to change due
to external factors, whereas expectations are concrete and are influenced by real barriers
to education, such as those produced by racial discrimination. The current findings
indicate that African Americans maintain high academic goals in the face of discrimination
which is encouragingbut that their expectations do not always meet their aspirations.
This gap between aspirations and expectations provides further evidence that many
African Americans maintain a high value for education despite perceiving it as inaccessible
to them.


The current study demonstrated that early experience with discrimination
negatively predicted college enrollment for African American adolescents at age 18 or 19.
This effect occurred through two pathways, both of which led to a decrease in academic
orientation: an erosion of their expectations to attend college and an increase in their
overall level of deviance tolerance. The impact of discrimination on change in
expectations was buffered, however, by future orientation. Interventions for at-risk
African Americans should consider these findings and aim to bolster future. Additionally,
encouraging positive expectations to attend college, not just setting lofty goals, should be
an important focus for these interventions. These results also indicated that academic
aspirations and future orientation were very high in this African American sample and
seemingly stable in the face of discrimination, suggesting that an emphasis on increasing
expectations could be highly effective. These steps may help improve academic outcomes
among African American adolescents and narrow the academic gap that persists in the
United States today.

This article I have read could be relevant to my life in means of discrimination,
because I was once being judged because of what I was doing and what my background is.
Having a few friends looks quite pathetic but this how my life goes. I told that it was
relevant for me because I feel the same thing as the African Americans, the feeling that
you accept the fact that youll be discriminated and you have predicted whats going to
happen to you the next day. Im a loner type guy because I thought no one would
understand what I am doing, I thought they always think that I am a bad person because I
drink, I smoke, doing things that are not appropriate to my age, Its like they disregarding
me because there is a gap between me and them.

Culture and Social Support Provision: Who Gives What and Why

The article is about Culture and Social Support Provision: Who Gives What and Why
The present research examined cultural differences in the type and frequency of support
provided as well as the motivations underlying these behaviors. Study 1, an open-ended
survey, asked participants about their social interactions in the past 24 hours and found
that European Americans reported providing emotion-focused support more frequently
than problem focused support, whereas Japanese exhibited the opposite pattern. Study 2,
a closed-ended questionnaire study, found that, in response to the close others big
stressor, European Americans provided more emotion-focused support whereas Japanese
provided equivalent amounts of emotion-focused and problem-focused support. In
addition, Study 2 examined motivational explanations for these differences. Social support
provision was motivated by the goal of closeness and increasing recipient self-esteem
among European Americans, but only associated with the motive for closeness among
Japanese. These studies illustrate the importance of considering cultural context and its
role in determining the meaning and function of various support behaviors.

The present research represents an initial step to understanding how culture
affects the way that people support one another through stressful times. Their findings
suggest different cultural norms for social support transactions and suggest different
cultural lay theories about the relative effectiveness of problem- and emotion-focused
support.

Seventy-eight European American undergraduate students (71% female) from a
large West Coast university participated in the study in exchange for credit in their
introductory psychology class. One-hundred and fifty six undergraduate students
(59%female) from a large Japanese university participated in the study for partial course
credit in a psychology course. The average age of Japanese participants was 19.54 years
(SD = 1.03). The questionnaire was implemented using Qualtrics, an online survey company
(www.qualtrics.com). The questionnaire was presented in English for the American sample
and Japanese from the Japanese sample. The questionnaire was created in English, then
translated from English to Japanese by a bilingual Japanese social psychologist, then back
translated by another bilingual Japanese social psychologist.
The present research represents an initial step to understanding how culture
affects the way that people support one another through stressful times. Their findings
suggest different cultural norms for social support transactions and suggest different
cultural lay theories about the relative effectiveness of problem- and emotion-focused
support.

This might be relevant to my life in terms of social support provision because I
might be needing the support with a positive outcome which is the emotion focused
support. Problems could be solve easier when you have social friends that gives love, care
and importance upon you, that might be the relevance of this article.



JOURNAL ANALYSIS


Joricel Francis S. Abad
BSPSY 3A1-2