The Theory of Racial Socialization in Action for Black Adolescents and Their Families

Responding to racism at school: Ethnic‐racial socialization and the academic engagement of Black and Latinx youth

“…Data for this analysis ( N = 81) derive from the Dallas Project on Education Pathways (DPREP), an eight‐wave longitudinal study of 407 Black and Latinx youth and their families with low socioeconomic standing in the Southwestern United States. The research team adapted an observational task for measuring bidirectional ethnic‐racial socialization processes in real time among Black parents and adolescents— The Racial Socialization Observation Task and Coding System (RSOTCS; Bynum, 2008 ; Smith‐Bynum & Usher, 2004 ). The adapted measure, called the Racial Socialization Observational Task (RSOT; Smith‐Bynum et al, 2019 ) for short, was administered at Wave 6, between Fall 2018 and Summer 2019 when study children were 11.09 years on average (range 10.36–11.74 years).…”

“…Interactions are video‐recorded and later rated for both content and process. The RSOT was originally designed and validated by a Black clinical psychologist using three pilot samples of Black parent‐adolescent dyads (Smith‐Bynum, 2006 , 2011 ; Smith‐Bynum & Usher, 2004 ) and was later adapted for use with this sample of Black and Latinx school‐age youth (Smith‐Bynum et al, 2019 ). The three vignettes depict racially and ethnically charged situations at school, with a police officer, and at a store.…”

“…The current research is guided by the Theory of Racial Socialization in Action (TRSA; Smith‐Bynum, in press ). Inspired by the TPRES, the Theory of Racial Socialization in Action emerged from 12 years of observational research on Black American families with a specific goal to capture the process‐oriented elements of TPRES.…”

Preparing Black and Latinx children for police encounters: Caregiver response profiles and child self‐regulation

“…Though widely accepted as valid, the process-oriented elements of ERS are often not assessed due to limited articulation of the processes and an absence of measurement tools to capture them. To address these limitations as well as a recent call for more elaborated approaches to ERS measurement (Wang et al, 2020), this study draws on the Theory of Racial Socialization in Action (TRSA; Smith- Bynum, 2023), a new theory of ERS designed to assess the dyadic processes embedded in socialization practices.…”

“…The TRSA (Smith- Bynum, 2023) is a targeted expansion of the Hughes and Chen (1999) model based on 12 years of formative, observational research with Black adolescents and their parents. The overarching assumptions of the theory assert that (a) ERS is a social learning process in the tradition of Vygotsky (1978); (b) parents' capacity for perspective taking and empathy affects their deployment of ERS messages and behaviors; and (c) child attributes (i.e., child age, gender, temperament, maturity) affect children's usage and receipt of ERS-based strategies for coping with racial discrimination.…”