The Ongoing Development of Strength-Based Approaches to People Who Hold Systemically Marginalized Identities.

ACADEMIC ABSTRACT: Personality and social psychology have historically viewed individuals' systemically marginalized identities (e.g., as people of color, as coming from a lower-income background) as barriers to their success. Such a deficit-based perspective limits psychological science by overlooking the broader experiences, value, perspectives, and strengths that individuals who face systemic marginalization often bring to their societies. The current article aims to support future research in incorporating a strength-based lens through tracing psychology's journey away from an emphasis on deficits among people who contend with systemic marginalization and toward three distinct strength-based approaches: the universal strengths, difference-as-strength, and identity-specific strengths approaches. Through distinguishing between each approach, we advance scholarship that aims to understand systemically marginalized identities with corresponding implications for addressing inequality. Strength-based approaches guide the field to recognize the imposed limitations of deficit-based ideologies and advance opportunities to engage in research that effectively understands and values systemically marginalized people. PUBLIC ABSTRACT: Inequalities, including those between people from higher- and lower-income backgrounds, are present across society. From schools to workplaces, hospitals to courtrooms, people who come from backgrounds that are marginalized by society often face more negative outcomes than people from more privileged backgrounds. While such inequalities are often blamed on a lack of hard work or other issues within marginalized people themselves, scientific research increasingly demonstrates that this is not the case. Rather, studies consistently find that people's identities as coming from groups that face marginalization in society often serve as a valuable source of unique strengths, not deficiencies, that can help them succeed. Our article reviews these studies to examine how future research in psychology may gain a broader understanding of people who contend with marginalization. In doing so, we outline opportunities for psychological research to effectively support efforts to address persistent inequalities.

Open science, communal culture, and women's participation in the movement to improve science.

Science is undergoing rapid change with the movement to improve science focused largely on reproducibility/replicability and open science practices. This moment of change-in which science turns inward to examine its methods and practices-provides an opportunity to address its historic lack of diversity and noninclusive culture. Through network modeling and semantic analysis, we provide an initial exploration of the structure, cultural frames, and women's participation in the open science and reproducibility literatures (n = 2,926 articles and conference proceedings). Network analyses suggest that the open science and reproducibility literatures are emerging relatively independently of each other, sharing few common papers or authors. We next examine whether the literatures differentially incorporate collaborative, prosocial ideals that are known to engage members of underrepresented groups more than independent, winner-takes-all approaches. We find that open science has a more connected, collaborative structure than does reproducibility. Semantic analyses of paper abstracts reveal that these literatures have adopted different cultural frames: open science includes more explicitly communal and prosocial language than does reproducibility. Finally, consistent with literature suggesting the diversity benefits of communal and prosocial purposes, we find that women publish more frequently in high-status author positions (first or last) within open science (vs. reproducibility). Furthermore, this finding is further patterned by team size and time. Women are more represented in larger teams within reproducibility, and women's participation is increasing in open science over time and decreasing in reproducibility. We conclude with actionable suggestions for cultivating a more prosocial and diverse culture of science.

Effects of social support in an academic context on low-grade inflammation in high school students.

Bolstering academic motivation is a high priority in school settings, but some evidence suggests this could take a toll on students' physical health. To address this, this study compared the effects of an experimental manipulation of academic motivation alone (AM) to academic motivation enhanced with social support (SS + AM) on markers of inflammation in a sample of 80 high school 9th graders. Outcomes included low-grade inflammation: C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-6 (IL-6); a motivation measure; and grade point average (GPA), taken at baseline and follow-up (beginning and end of school year, respectively). Students in the SS + AM condition had lower levels of inflammation at follow-up (covarying baseline levels) compared to those in the AM condition. The two groups were equivalent on motivation and GPA at follow-up. This preliminary study suggests that incorporating social support into academic motivation programs has the potential to benefit inflammatory markers in young people while allowing them to maintain positive academic outcomes.

An experimental demonstration of the positive consequences of guiding students to conceptualize education as connection.

INTRODUCTION: Educators often struggle to sustain students' motivation during adolescence. Students may view school tasks as insignificant because learning, achievement, and success feel detached from valued social connections. Previous findings in the study of development demonstrate that young people derive meaning from key sources of social support and connection. Finding ways to link how students approach their educational goals to meaningful social connections may strengthen responses to daily learning opportunities with positive implications for achievement. METHOD: A randomized-controlled experiment and daily diary survey evaluated the consequences of guiding students to conceptualize educational pursuits as linked to their social connections. A group of ninth-grade students in the United States (N = 39; 58.97 % girls, 30.77 % boys, 2.56 % non-binary, 7.69 % did not disclose) were randomly assigned to one of two brief programs designed to cultivate goals and motivation. RESULTS: Participants randomly assigned to a healthy achievement condition (including an emphasis on the importance of social support and connection as part of achievement and success) reported more productive responses to daily academic difficulty than participants in a standard motivation condition on a daily diary survey over one year after the program. This led to an indirect increase in actual daily support, which was associated with earning higher grades. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that a reconceptualization of education as an endeavor grounded in social connection would help keep students engaged in learning.

A brief randomized controlled intervention targeting parents improves grades during middle school.

Despite a growing number of brief, psychosocial interventions that improve academic achievement, little research investigates how to leverage parents during such efforts. We designed and tested a randomized controlled intervention targeting parents to influence important discussions about the future and responses to academic difficulty experienced by their adolescent during eighth grade in the United States. We recruited experienced parents to convey the main messages of the intervention in a parent panel format. As expected, current parents who were randomly assigned to observe the parent panel subsequently planned to talk with their adolescents sooner about future opportunities and to respond more positively to experiences of academic difficulty than parents who were randomly assigned to a control group. The intervention also led to a significant increase in student grades, which was mediated by parents' responses to academic difficulty. We suggest an increase in experimental research that utilizes parents to influence student achievement.

A Difference-Education Intervention Equips First-Generation College Students to Thrive in the Face of Stressful College Situations.

A growing social psychological literature reveals that brief interventions can benefit disadvantaged students. We tested a key component of the theoretical assumption that interventions exert long-term effects because they initiate recursive processes. Focusing on how interventions alter students' responses to specific situations over time, we conducted a follow-up lab study with students who had participated in a difference-education intervention 2 years earlier. In the intervention, students learned how their social-class backgrounds mattered in college. The follow-up study assessed participants' behavioral and hormonal responses to stressful college situations. We found that difference-education participants discussed their backgrounds in a speech more frequently than control participants did, an indication that they retained the understanding of how their backgrounds mattered. Moreover, among first-generation students (i.e., students whose parents did not have 4-year degrees), those in the difference-education condition showed greater physiological thriving (i.e., anabolic-balance reactivity) than those in the control condition, which suggests that they experienced their working-class backgrounds as a strength.

Closing the social-class achievement gap: a difference-education intervention improves first-generation students' academic performance and all students' college transition.

College students who do not have parents with 4-year degrees (first-generation students) earn lower grades and encounter more obstacles to success than do students who have at least one parent with a 4-year degree (continuing-generation students). In the study reported here, we tested a novel intervention designed to reduce this social-class achievement gap with a randomized controlled trial (N = 168). Using senior college students' real-life stories, we conducted a difference-education intervention with incoming students about how their diverse backgrounds can shape what they experience in college. Compared with a standard intervention that provided similar stories of college adjustment without highlighting students' different backgrounds, the difference-education intervention eliminated the social-class achievement gap by increasing first-generation students' tendency to seek out college resources (e.g., meeting with professors) and, in turn, improving their end-of-year grade point averages. The difference-education intervention also improved the college transition for all students on numerous psychosocial outcomes (e.g., mental health and engagement).

Educators' Beliefs About Students' Socioeconomic Backgrounds as a Pathway for Supporting Motivation.

Students' understandings of their socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds have important implications for their motivation, achievement, and the emergence of SES-based educational disparities. Educators' beliefs about students' backgrounds likely play a meaningful role in shaping these understandings and, thus, may represent an important opportunity to support students from lower-SES backgrounds. We first experimentally demonstrate that educators can be encouraged to adopt background-specific strengths beliefs-which view students' lower-SES backgrounds as potential sources of unique and beneficial strengths (NStudy 1 = 125). Subsequently, we find that exposure to educators who communicate background-specific strengths beliefs positively influences the motivation and academic persistence of students, particularly those from lower-SES backgrounds (NStudy 2 = 256; NStudy 3 = 276). Furthermore, lower-SES students' own beliefs about their backgrounds mediated these effects. Altogether, our work contributes to social-psychological theory and practice regarding how key societal contexts can promote equity through identity-based processes.

Concern about experiencing downward socioeconomic mobility generates precarious types of motivation among students of color.

Students' beliefs about whether they will experience changes in their socioeconomic status influence their academic motivation. We propose that students who are concerned about downward socioeconomic mobility will focus their attention on negative academic outcomes and exhibit motivational goals oriented towards preventing negative possibilities and that this relationship will be particularly pronounced among students of color. Two studies investigated the relationship between college students' concerns about downward socioeconomic mobility and their adoption of academic achievement goals. The more that students of color expressed concerns about experiencing downward socioeconomic mobility, the more they adopted academic mastery-avoidance goals (ß = 0.76), whereas there was no significant relationship between concerns about downward socioeconomic mobility and mastery-avoidance goals among White students (ß = - 0.24; Study 1). Experimentally induced concerns about downward socioeconomic mobility increased academic mastery-avoidance goals among students of color (ß = - 0.58) but decreased mastery-avoidance goals among White students (ß = 0.46; Study 2). Together, results indicate that there is a strong relationship between concerns about downward socioeconomic mobility and mastery-avoidance goals among students of color, highlighting the importance of understating how students of color make sense of their future socioeconomic prospects in order to most effectively support their academic trajectories positively. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11218-023-09763-5.

Race, academic achievement and the issue of inequitable motivational payoff.

As racial inequities continue to pervade school systems around the world, further research is necessary to understand the factors undergirding this pressing issue. Here across three studies conducted in the United States (N = 8,293), we provide evidence that race-based differences in student achievement do not stem from a lack of motivation among Black, Latinx and Indigenous (BLI) students, but a lack of equitable motivational payoff. Even when BLI and non-BLI students have the same levels of motivation, BLI students still receive maths grades that are an average of 9% lower than those of their non-BLI peers (95% confidence interval 7 to 11%). This pattern was not explained by differences in students' aptitude, effort or prior achievement but was instead linked to teachers' diminished expectations for their BLI students' academic futures. We conclude by discussing statistical power limitations and the implications of the current findings for how researchers consider the sources of, and solutions for, educational inequity.

"Feeling" hierarchy: the pathway from subjective social status to achievement.

The current study tested a psychosocial mediation model of the association between subjective social status (SSS) and academic achievement for youth. The sample included 430 high school students from diverse racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Those who perceived themselves to be at higher social status levels had higher GPAs. As predicted by the model, most of the relationship was mediated by emotional distress and study skills and habits. The lower SSS students had more depressive symptoms, which led to less effective studying and lower GPA. The model held across different racial/ethnic groups, was tested against alternative models, and results remained stable controlling for objective socioeconomic status. Implications for identity-based intervention are discussed.

Identity-based motivation: Implications for intervention.

Children want to succeed academically and attend college, but their actual attainment often lags behind; some groups (e.g., boys, low-income children) are particularly likely to experience this gap. Social structural factors matter, influencing this gap in part by affecting children's perceptions of what is possible for them and people like them in the future. Interventions that focus on this macro-micro interface can boost children's attainment. We articulate the processes underlying these effects using an integrative culturally sensitive framework entitled identity-based motivation (IBM, Oyserman, 2007, 2009a, 2009b). The IBM model assumes that identities are dynamically constructed in context. People interpret situations and difficulties in ways that are congruent with currently active identities and prefer identity-congruent to identity-incongruent actions. When action feels identity-congruent, experienced difficulty highlights that the behavior is important and meaningful. When action feels identity-incongruent, the same difficulty suggests that the behavior is pointless and "not for people like me."

From assets to school outcomes: how finances shape children's perceived possibilities and intentions.

People do not always take action to attain their desired possible selves--after all, whether consciously or nonconsciously, taking current action makes sense if there is an open path toward attaining the desired self, but not if paths are closed. Following this logic, children from families with fewer assets may lower their expectations for school success and plan to engage in less effort in school. To test this hypothesis, we examined the impact of experimentally manipulating mind-set about college as either "closed" (expensive) or "open" (can be paid for with need-based financial aid) among low-income early adolescents. Adolescents assigned to an open-path condition expected higher grades than those assigned to a closed-path condition (Study 1, n= 48, predominantly Hispanic and Latino seventh graders) and planned to spend more time on homework than those assigned to a no-prime control condition (Study 2, n= 48, predominantly African American seventh graders).

A path to advance research on identity and socioeconomic opportunity.

A growing amount of psychological theory and evidence explains pathways between a young person's socioeconomic background, their identity, and their achievement of academic and career goals. These models provide an important foundation to investigating life trajectories, which can be expanded in 3 specific ways. First, studies can explicitly consider the important role of other social factors that intersect and overlap with socioeconomic considerations, including those related to the experience of race-ethnicity and racism. They can also be expanded to more directly acknowledge the strengths and assets of students from nondominant groups. Last, more research can holistically investigate the connections between achievement goal pursuit and physical health. The current article highlights select empirical studies advancing the psychological study of socioeconomic opportunity in these ways. The article also includes implications for the study of identity and the development of not only interventions but also a reimagining of systemic and institutional support particularly for people who face multiple dimensions of barriers in pursuing opportunities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Socioeconomic mobility, identity, and health: Experiences that influence immunology and implications for intervention.

By many accounts, young people from modest socioeconomic backgrounds who succeed in education and secure gainful employment should expect to experience better physical health as a result of their elevated social position. However, increasing evidence indicates that experiences of socioeconomic mobility may not accompany a health benefit but rather can lead to poorer physical health for some individuals. On certain indicators, adults who originated from disadvantaged backgrounds and achieved educational and economic success found themselves in worse health than their childhood peers who did not experience an upward socioeconomic trajectory. The current article organizes studies from three bodies of research that attempt to describe and explain the health costs of socioeconomic mobility. In addition, a novel framework builds upon the existing studies to articulate a common psychological process, centered on identity and immunology. Underutilized studies of identity provide a deeper understanding of the challenges associated with socioeconomic mobility and their consequences for inflammation and the immune system. The novel framework serves to bridge prior studies of socioeconomic status and health and also provides guidance to inform future studies. Finally, interventions to encourage socioeconomic mobility are considered, with an emphasis on provisions to include elements of social support that may lead to simultaneous positive effects on achievement and physical health. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Implications of intersecting socioeconomic and racial-ethnic identities for academic achievement and well-being.

The evolving study of identity development has become increasingly attentive to the ways that young people think about their socioeconomic and racial-ethnic identities. The status-based identity framework provides one way to analyze the implications of these dynamic identities, particularly as people approach young adulthood. For students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, the experience of socioeconomic mobility can accompany an aversive sense of uncertainty about their own SES, termed status uncertainty, with potential negative implications for their academic behaviors and outcomes. A longitudinal study and experiment demonstrate some of these consequences and suggest how intersections between socioeconomic and racial-ethnic identities may be associated with well-being. This perspective on the dynamic identities of young people calls for consistent attention to the various levels of context that can be leveraged to support positive development, effective goal pursuit, and desired life trajectories.

Do Student Mindsets Differ by Socioeconomic Status and Explain Disparities in Academic Achievement in the United States?

Students from higher-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds show a persistent advantage in academic outcomes over lower-SES students. It is possible that students' beliefs about academic ability, or mindsets, play some role in contributing to these disparities. Data from a recent nationally representative sample of ninth-grade students in U.S. public schools provided evidence that higher SES was associated with fewer fixed beliefs about academic ability (a group difference of .22 standard deviations). Also, there was a negative association between a fixed mindset and grades that was similar regardless of a student's SES. Finally, student mindsets were a significant but small factor in explaining the existing relationship between SES and achievement. Altogether, mindsets appear to be associated with socioeconomic circumstances and academic achievement; however, the vast majority of the existing socioeconomic achievement gap in the U.S. is likely driven by the root causes of inequality.

How economic inequality shapes mobility expectations and behaviour in disadvantaged youth.

Economic inequality can have a range of negative consequences for those in younger generations, particularly for those from lower-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Economists and psychologists, among other social scientists, have addressed this issue, but have proceeded largely in parallel. This Perspective outlines how these disciplines have proposed and provided empirical support for complementary theoretical models. Specifically, both disciplines emphasize that inequality weakens people's belief in socioeconomic opportunity, thereby reducing the likelihood that low-SES young people will engage in behaviours that would improve their chances of upward mobility (for example, persisting in school or averting teenage pregnancy). In integrating the methods and techniques of economics and psychology, we offer a cohesive framework for considering this issue. When viewed as a whole, the interdisciplinary body of evidence presents a more complete and compelling framework than does either discipline alone. We use this unification to offer policy recommendations that would advance prospects for mobility among low-SES young people.

Can Identity Conflicts Impede the Success of Ethnic Minority Students? Consequences of Discrepancies Between Ethnic and Ideal Selves.

Because of stigma and underrepresentation, many ethnic minority students may find it difficult to align their ethnicities with their ideal selves. However, these difficulties and their potential consequences have been empirically neglected. To inform this gap in the literature, we propose that the novel concept of ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies (i.e., perceived mismatches between who a person aspires to be and this person's conception of their ethnic self) is associated with the academic outcomes of ethnic minority students. As hypothesized, large ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies predict high academic disengagement, according to cross-sectional data from Study 1 ( n = 147) and Study 2 ( n = 105), as well as high academic disengagement 2 months later according to half-longitudinal data from Study 2 ( n = 78). In Study 3 ( n = 99), ethnic minority students experimentally induced to perceive high ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies reported significantly higher academic disengagement than ethnic minority students in a low discrepancy condition.

Upward social mobility and identity.

As psychological research on socioeconomic status (SES) continues to expand, greater attention should be devoted to the influence of social mobility and the dynamic and malleable aspects of SES on people's lives. Status-based identity describes how people's socioeconomic circumstances relate to their broader sense of self and the meaning that they make of their own SES. Such an approach allows for complex study of the challenges and consequences of a change in SES. Research related to status-based identity suggests that although social mobility is often considered a signifier of reduced inequality, upward social mobility may also exacerbate other forms of inequality by instigating a destabilizing sense of status uncertainty that impairs motivation and well-being for class migrants.