This mixed-model study examined the relationship between urban adolescents' perceived support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice from peers, family, and community members and their critical consciousness development. These relationships were examined by relating participants' qualitative perceptions of support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice to quantitative data obtained from Likert-type measures of the reflection and action components of critical consciousness. Perceived support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice had a significant impact upon the reflection component of critical consciousness; the significance criterion was supported by effect size estimates. Support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice was not significantly related to the action component of critical consciousness. Participants perceived the most support for challenging racism, moderate support for challenging social injustice, and the least support for challenging sexism. Additionally, female participants perceived more support for challenging sexism than male participants. These results suggest that the informal interactions of urban adolescents play a role in shaping their critical consciousness, and hold implications for psychosocial interventions and research with marginalized populations.

Sociopolitical development represents a motivation to reduce sociopolitical inequity, a healthy sense of the self, and perceived agency in the context of structural oppression. Sociopolitical development has been associated with progress in career development, school engagement, and healthier sexual behavior among oppressed and marginalized adolescents. However, knowledge of outcomes that sociopolitical development may facilitate has outpaced knowledge of what may facilitate sociopolitical development. This paper examines key aspects of adolescents' context—the school and parents—and their potential influence on the sociopolitical development of poor adolescents of color. This research question is examined with 2,078 National Educational Longitudinal Survey participants. The obtained structural equation model suggests that parental support and student racial relations are predictive of sociopolitical development. These results provide empirical support for extant sociopolitical development models and illuminate our understanding of a critical social justice issue. These results inform sociopolitical development interventions, counseling practice, and scholarly understanding of how oppressed adolescents cope with sociopolitical inequity.

Person‐oriented approaches to social and behavioral developmental sciences proceed from the fact that aggregate‐level descriptions of constancy and change usually fail to represent individuals. Protagonists of the person‐oriented approach (Bergman, Magnusson, von Eye) have, therefore, presented tenets that state that development can be person‐specific and that psychometric instruments must possess dimensional identity to be applicable over time, and to enable researchers to perform comparisons of individuals or groups of individuals. Protagonists of idiographic psychology (Molenaar) have shown that cross‐sectional information can be used as substitute for longitudinal information only under conditions that are atypical of developmental processes. In the first part of this chapter, main lines of the person‐oriented and idiographic research are presented, and compared with differential psychology. In the second part, methods of analysis are discussed that are suitable for person‐oriented research. These methods include, but are not restricted to, hierarchical linear modeling, time series analysis, longitudinal factor analysis, Configural Frequency Analysis ( CFA ), and Item Response Theory ( IRT ). Examples with empirical data are given for CFA and IRT . In the discussion, perspectives of the research planner, the data analyst, and the applied developmental scientist are taken.

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This paper presents an application of a jackknifing approach to variance estimation of ability inferences for groups of students, using a multidimensional discrete model for item response data. The data utilized to demonstrate the approach come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In contrast to the operational approach used in NAEP, where plausible values are used to make ability inferences, the approach presented in this paper reestimates all parameters of the model, and makes ability inferences based on replicate samples of the jackknife without using plausible values.Results of the standard errors are presented for estimates of group means, total means, and other statistics used in official reporting by NAEP. Differences in results between this approach and the operational approach are discussed.