Families with young children experience many stressors, from financial stress, unreliable childcare or employment, daily parenting challenges, and mental health. With current research, families are often identified and targeted for extra support according to their level of need in one of more of these categories. However, both stressors and supports interact in intricate ways and fluctuate for families over time. Alongside colleagues with the RAPID team at Stanford University, I will explore stressors and supports among a large national sample of children and families using network analysis. This longitudinal data will allow us to uniquely identify the most influential stressors and supports for families over time, highlighting subgroups of families in need of the most resources. I will also utilize mixed methods to allow parent narratives of their daily life stressors and supports align with the findings from our network analysis. 

Bronfenbrenner. Ainsworth. Piaget. Vygotsky. Skinner. Sound familiar? These seminal Western theorists are among the group of widely cited theories of human development that graduate students and academics alike are expected to use to ground their research in human development or developmental psychology. Meanwhile, Indigenous theories and frameworks of how humans develop over time are largely missing from the literature. Alongside colleagues from Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health, we are working to synthesize and summarizing current theories and frameworks of human development accessible in published academic literature. This project will continue beyond the scoping review to explore theory development in future years.

Diverse, yet often overlapping, terminology has been used to describe the building blocks of ethnic, racial, ethnic-racial, and cultural identity development as well as relevant socialization processes for children. For the first aim of this paper, we will conduct a mini scoping review of social sciences literature to summarize and synthesize common terminology regarding ethnic, racial, ethnic-racial, and cultural identity and the socialization processes associated with these concepts. The second aim of this paper is to weave together these concepts into a model that reflects the unity and diversity among these terms for research and teaching in the social sciences: The Ethnocultural Quilt. 

Stay tuned for updates on this research area of focus. I am open to community partnership work that aligns with this area of my expertise, especially with Indigenous or Urban Indian organizations and tribes. Please reach out if you would like to connect about a possible partnership.