It’s another #MustReadMonday, and we are so excited to highlight a fantastic paper by our very own former SRA president, Stephen Russell.
It’s time for another #MustReadMonday, and maybe it’s the new year or the abundance of snow on the ground, but we’re feeling a little nostalgic here at SRA!
For this week’s #MustReadMonday, we were very fortunate to speak with Dr. Joanna Williams about a recent article she published on adolescent perceptions of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville: From Apathy to Vigilance: Young Adolescents’ Reactions to the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville.
Adolescence is a life stage defined by significant biological and social changes. Youth with underlying risk for substance use involvement may experience difficulty navigating these changes, increasing the likelihood of maladjustment.
For this week’s #MustReadMonday, we are very excited to highlight a recent paper by Dr. Benjamin Oosterhoff and colleagues: Historical Trends in Concerns About Social Issues Across Four Decades Among U.S. Adolescents.
Thanks to some amazing anti-bullying campaigns in North America, most of us know that bullying can have some serious & harmful negative consequences for our mental health. But what if we told you that bullying can also affect adolescents at a cellular level?
For our third #MustReadMonday, we are very excited to highlight a recent paper by Dr. Adriana Aldana that’s all about how to measure youth anti-racism: Youth Anti-Racist Engagement: Conceptualization, Development, and Validation of an Anti-Racism Action Scale
We’re doing our best to avoid all things election, so for our second #MustReadMonday we’re focusing on the silver linings of politics: youth and civic engagement.
Alongside the devastating impacts of COVID-19 on people’s lives and livelihoods, academia has had to adjust to a new world where in-person research may not be possible in the near future. Social media — where 45% of teenagers spend time “almost constantly” (Anderson & Jiang, 2018) — is a promising option for research with adolescents. However, this type of research presents special ethical considerations.
Just Because We Can, Doesn’t Mean We Should
On June 17th, a White PhD student tweeted that he had scraped 10,000 tweets containing the hashtag #BlackinIvory. This hashtag was originally created for Black scholars to share personal stories of racism and discrimination in academia. Within minutes, dozens of scholars commented to discourage the PhD student from conducting this research without obtaining consent. The PhD student deleted the post and apologized.
Here at SRA, we are passionate about staying up to date on the newest research being done within the field of adolescence. In pursuit of this goal, we have recently started a new initiative across our social media platforms, #MustReadMonday.
I am sitting at home, and the students in my class are neatly positioned in 2x2 inch squares on a screen. Already this semester is different from our long summer days of doctoral student residency where we sat in our poorly ventilated seminar room, navigating a table of notebooks, printed research articles, and the occasional spilled coffee. Instead, we are in our homes and apartments interacting through a camera and a screen that resembles the opening of The Brady Bunch (a reference many of the younger doctoral students don’t even know).
Despite this new method of engagement, familiar and recurring feelings arise for these new students: imposter syndrome; wondering if the program made the right choice of “letting them in”; afraid that being a doctoral student will pull them away from their communities and widen the gap between their educational achievements and those of their family members. They worry about learning a new set of vocabulary which includes words like epistemology and critical discourse and everyone’s favorite word to say aloud, phenomenology.'
Meditation can help adolescents reduce stress and self-regulate (thoughts, emotions, behaviors), but they may need help creating the time and space to practice this behavior.
Elizabeth Weybright, Ph.D., Linda Caldwell, Ph.D., Erica Doering, M.S.
Some teens show resilience despite adverse conditions, but the individual, social, and community factors supporting resilience vary around the globe.
The Society for Research on Adolescence is a non-partisan organization that promotes the scientific study of adolescence. Any political views reflected in this blog represent the perception of adolescent research participants.
New research reveals how different parenting “styles” foster the development of different sets of values among teens.
Parenting is known to influence adolescents’ academic adjustment. What happens when cultural norms related to parenting change?
Some ethnic and demographic groups are difficult to recruit for research studies. Mobile devices and other new technologies can eliminate some barriers, especially when used mindfully.
Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is a term used to describe the collection of data in real time while subjects remain in their natural environments. Many adolescence researchers are familiar with contemporary beginnings in social science research, such as when Reed Larson and Claudia Lampman-Petraitis signaled adolescents to record their emotional state using electronic pagers. However, with the growing ubiquity of smart phone use and ownership among adolescents, EMA has become more common and more feasible.
Assessing change in mental health, such as depressive symptoms, across development is particularly challenging for two related reasons. First, the symptoms of depression look different at different ages; for example, in childhood, depression often manifests as angry mood, but as youth age, depression manifests as sadness and suicidal ideation. Second, and accordingly, the way clinicians and researchers measure mental health symptoms also changes across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. To examine depressive symptoms, children are often assessed using tools like the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI; validated for use with children age 8-17 years), while adults are assessed using measures like the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II; validated for use with adolescents and adults age 13 and older). Although both tools are reliable, valid, and age-appropriate, they include different items and response options. This makes it challenging to track how individuals’ level of depression changes with age. If different measures are used at different times, it is not possible to know whether the observed changes in depression are indicative of an individual’s symptoms changing over time or if they are a by-product of change in the measurement instrument. Tracking and answering questions about changes in depressive symptoms when different measurement tools are used requires some creative linking of the different tools.
