Research focus
The school is a central socialization context for young people. In this context, adolescents do not only acquire academic skills, but also social attitudes and behaviors. In an immigration country like Germany, schools are among the first contexts in which young people come into contact with peers from different cultural and social backgrounds. The school is thus also a significant context for the acquisition of attitudes and behaviors toward other cultural and social groups.
The research group focuses primarily on socialization in the school context, but also includes socialization in other important contexts such as peers and the family. The focus is on dealing with cultural diversity and social inequality in society.
Research topics include intercultural competence and critical consciousness among adolescents and (prospective) teachers, the school diversity climate, intercultural socialization in friendships, and discrimination in the school context.
Central to our research is a resource-oriented perspective on culturally diverse schools and an interdisciplinary approach that links theories and findings from developmental psychology, social psychology, intercultural psychology, and educational science.
Research projects
Participants: Miriam Schwarzenthal (Bergische Universität Wuppertal), Katharina Eckstein (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)
Cooperation partner: Balu und Du e.V.
In the context of increasing diversity, a central task of our society is to provide all children and young people with equal opportunities in education. Despite this objective, there are numerous disparities in Germany, particularly in the field of education, for example along the lines of socio-economic status and family migration history. The mentoring program Balu und Du e.V. contributes to the promotion of equal opportunities and educational justice, in that primary school children (Moglis) are paired for one year with mentors (Balus). The aim of our research project is to investigate whether mentoring can promote civic attitudes and behaviors among the Balus in the short and long term, which can contribute to more equal opportunities. To this end, we are conducting a longitudinal survey with four measurement points as well as qualitative interviews.
Participants: Linda Juang (Universität Potsdam), Miriam Schwarzenthal (Bergische Universität Wuppertal), Tuğçe Aral (Universität Potsdam)
Funded by the Leibniz-Institut für Psychologie (PsychLab)
Although there are many benefits for youth growing up in culturally diverse societies such as developing interethnic friendships and intercultural competence, there are also potential challenges. Youth can perpetrate, experience, and witness group-based exclusion and discrimination. In Germany, we know little of how parents socialize youth to be aware of, reflect on, and address these positive and negative intergroup experiences. Therefore, our project focuses on ethnic-racial socialization, the “behaviors, practices, and social regularities that implicitly or explicitly communicate information and worldviews about culture, ethnicity, and race” to young people (Hughes et al., 2016, p. 4). After conducting qualitative interviews with both majority non-migrant and minority parents of migrant descent, we will develop and test the psychometric properties of two new measures of ethnic-racial socialization for these two groups. These would be the first quantitative measures of parental ethnic-racial socialization in Germany, which would be useful as a new tool for much-needed studies on this topic.
Dissertation project Yağmur Güleç
Students with low SES and a family history of migration face systemic challenges (e.g., financial difficulties, discrimination, lack of extra support) to get ahead (OECD, 2023). These factors consequently may affect those students’ motivation and academic achievement. To reduce these educational inequities, teachers should be critically engaged and reflective themselves (Gay & Kirkland, 2010). The critical consciousness (CC) framework allows us to conceptually investigate teachers’ attributions, political self-efficacy, and actions towards educational inequities. This doctoral project aims to examine the level of preservice teachers’ CC, predictors of CC, the role of intersectionality and student characteristics (disadvantaged vs. privileged), as well as ingroup bias in CC, and lastly, whether CC could be primed.
Critical consciousness (CC) is a developmental asset for adolescents growing up in societies marked by social inequity, racism, and discrimination. One component of CC is critical reflection, i.e., analyzing structures that marginalize groups of people (Heberle et al., 2020). In recent years, several scales were developed capturing critical reflection among youth (e.g., Diemer et al., 2017, 2022). These, however, have the disadvantage that they mainly rely on self-reports. Qualitative methods may better capture complex processes of critical reflection, but are typically only used with small samples. Against this background, this project aims to develop an instrument to capture critical reflection among adolescents using case studies. Based on interviews with adolescents, we developed case studies depicting situations at school or among peers that are marked by social inequity. The adolescents are asked to provide written explanations of the situations. After an expert review and cognitive pretests, we are currently conducting a cross-sectional survey with adolescents to validate the new case studies and to investigate relations with predictor and outcome variables.
