Welcome to the Youth Development in Context Lab

The Youth Development in Context Lab seeks to better understand the ways that community, school and family settings combine to shape child and adolescent development.  With a special focus on cultural contexts of development, recent studies have focused on understanding ethnic identity development, interethnic group social preferences, and school attitudes & outcomes among diverse groups of second-generation immigrant youth in the US.

Our research team has several collaborations with the Brown University Child Development in Context Research Program.  The current research project is entitled "Documenting and Understanding the Immigrant Paradox", funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation and co-led by Drs. Amy Marks & Cynthia García Coll. This study, initiated in the Spring of 2007, utilizes two national databases to look at how multifaceted peer, school, family, and neighborhood contexts relate to educational, behavioral, and health outcomes in immigrant youth. Learn more...