Adolescent Diversity in Ethnic, Economic, and Cultural Contexts

Hector G. Balcazar, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Family Resources and Human Development at Arizona State University. His research interests include Latino health issues, acculturation and health, maternal and child health, and chronic disease and prevention program development for Latinos.

Fred Beauvais is a senior research scientist with the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research at Colorado State University. He has worked for more than 20 years with numerous Indian communities collecting data for basic research that also enables them to design interventions for social problems more effectively. His primary work has been in the area of substance abuse, but he also has conducted studies on school dropouts, violence and victimization, and the training of mental health professionals. The development of procedures for conducting culturally sensitive research has been a parallel interest.

Gina R. Boyer is a graduate student in the clinical program of the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. Her research interests include parenting, African American families, and cross-cultural issues in assessment and testing.

Felipe Gonzales Castro, MSW, PhD, is Professor of Psychology in the clinical psychology program of the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. He served as Director of the Hispanic Research Center at Arizona State University from 1991 to 1997. He has conducted various research projects in the area of Hispanic/Latino health. His research areas include drug abuse and addiction, prevention and treatment, and health promotion in minority populations.

Ruth K. Chao, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the developmental program of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, [Page 293]Riverside. She received her PhD in educational psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1992 and held a postdoctoral position for 2 years in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. Her research interests have primarily involved studies of East Asian immigrant families, focusing on the role of parenting in children's school achievement. Part of her research on parenting has included an alternative parenting style—training—to describe immigrant Chinese parents.

Lisa J. Crockett is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research interests include adolescent problem behavior, the development of behavioral trajectories, gender issues, and the transition to adulthood. She is coeditor, with Ann C. Crouter, of Pathways Through Adolescence: Individual Development in Relation to Social Contexts (1995) and coeditor, with Rainer K. Silbereisen, of Negotiating Adolescence in Times of Social Change (2000).

Michael Cunningham, a developmental psychologist, is Assistant Professor of Psychology and African & African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University. His primary research interests include examining adolescent development in diverse contexts. Specifically, he examines how self-perceptions influence how African American adolescent males develop proactive and reactive coping styles. Currently, he is examining the influence of context-specific perceptions on academic achievement orientation in African American youth.

Erin E. Hardin is a graduate student in the counseling psychology program at Ohio State University. She received her BA in psychology from Grinnell College in 1994. Her master's thesis examined the role of cultural factors in the measurement of career maturity among Asian American college students. Her other research interests include the acculturation and adjustment of Asian Americans, culturally appropriate counseling interventions, and cross-cultural psychology.

Julia Jackson-Newsom is a project coordinator for Tanglewood Research, Inc., in Clemmons, NC. Her research interests include adolescent problem behavior, sibling differences in sychosocial outcomes, and substance use prevention. Her master's thesis is titled Predictors of Substance Use Trajectories in Adolescence.

[Page 294]Leanne Jacobson is a graduate student in the developmental division of the Department of Psychology at Temple University. Her research interests include adolescent social and emotional adjustment and the etiology of juvenile delinquency.

Frederick T. L. Leong is Associate Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University (OSU). He obtained his PhD from the University of Maryland with a double specialty in Counseling and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Currently, he serves as a faculty member in both the Counseling and Industrial/Organizational Psychology programs at OSU. He has more than 70 publications in various counseling and psychology journals and 30 book chapters. He is the editor of Career Development and Vocational Behavior of Racial and Ethnic Minorities (1995). His most recent book (coedited with James Austin) is Psychology Research Handbook: A Guide for Graduate Students and Research Assistants (1996, Sage). His major research interests are in vocational psychology, Asian American psychology, cross-cultural psychology (particularly culture and mental health), and personality and adjustment.

Gary W. Peterson, PhD, is Professor in and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Arizona State University. His areas of expertise include adolescent development within families and parent-child relationships. Specific topics have included parental contributors to adolescent social competence, autonomy, conformity to parents, and status attainment among samples of middle- and low-income urban and rural youth. Currently, he is examining these and ethnic and cultural issues in samples of adolescents from the People's Republic of China, Russia, and the United States. Samples from the United States include Mexican American youth and low-income rural youth from Appalachia. A related theme in his work has been the application of family and sociological theories to the study of adolescent development. Currently, he is a coeditor of the Handbook of Marriage and the Family (2nd ed.).

Debra Roberts is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Family Studies, University of Maryland, College Park. She received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Temple University and her MS in Community Psychology from Florida A&M University. [Page 295]Her research interests include ethnic/cultural identity and the normative development of children of African descent.

Edward Seidman is Professor of Psychology at New York University. Previously, he was Vice President and Dean of Research, Development, and Policy at Bank Street College of Education, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Manitoba. He is the recipient of a Senior Fulbright Hays Research Scholar Award, and the award for Distinguished Contributions to Theory and Research in Community Psychology. He is editor of the Handbook of Social Intervention (1983), and coeditor of Redefining Social Problems (1986) and the Handbook of Community Psychology (2000). His earlier intervention research on the diversion of adolescents in legal jeopardy from the juvenile justice system received several national awards. His current research and scholarship focus on the social development of urban adolescents, primary prevention, and social policy.

Michael J. Shanahan is Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include children in poverty, the ecology of adolescent work, and historical patterns in adult educational and occupational attainment. He is coeditor (with J. Tudge & J. Valsiner) of Comparisons in Human Development: Understanding Time and Context (1996).

Margaret Beale Spencer, a developmental psychologist, is the Board of Overseers Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the director of the Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development program (ISHD), the Center for Health, Achievement, Neighborhood, Growth, and Ethnic Studies (CHANGES), and the W. E. B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute. Her adolescent-focused research addresses resiliency, identity, and competence-formation processes, particularly among youth of color. Her current research is on the maturing cognitive capacities and socioemotional development of low-income African American adolescents and an examination of factors that differentially predict resilient and unproductive outcomes.

[Page 296]Ronald D. Taylor is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Assistant Director of the Center for Research in Human Development and Education at Temple University. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in Developmental Psychology. His research interests include the social and emotional development and family relations of ethnic-minority adolescents. His most current research focuses on the impact of neighborhood conditions on family processes and adolescent psychological well-being among poor, urban, African American and European American families.

Stephan M. Wilson, PhD, is Director of the Research Center for Families and Children, Professor of Family Studies, and an Appalachian Center Associate at the University of Kentucky. His areas of expertise include adolescent development within family and community contexts, parent-child interactions, rural and Appalachian adolescents and families, and work-family issues. He has investigated these and related topics in such journals as Adolescence, Journal of Adolescent Research, Journal of Adolescence, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Family Relations, Family Science Review, Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, Journal of Family Issues, Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy, Sociological Inquiry, Journal of Counseling and Development, Lifestyles, Family Life Educator, and American Journal of Health Promotion, as well as in book chapters on family-of-origin influences on late-adolescent lifestyle decisions and on educational and occupational attainment and life satisfaction, rural and Appalachian youth, school-family relations, and family wellness.

Hirokazu Yoshikawa is Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University, specializing in community psychology. His research areas include the effects of welfare policies on children and families, the experiences of working families in poverty, competence among children and adolescents in poverty, long-term effects of early childhood intervention programs, and community-level HIV prevention among Asian/Pacific Islander communities. He served recently on the Department of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Head Start Research and Evaluation. He is a coeditor of A Quarter Century of Community Psychology (in press) and Design Issues in Prevention and Intervention Research (in press). He received his PhD in clinical psychology from New York University.