Broadly, the Gender and Achievement Research Program is interested in the study of the psychological and social factors that influence individuals' achievement-related choices and activity involvement. More specifically, we study questions such as: Why are there gender and ethnic group differences in career choice (particularly in the domains of math, science, information technology, music, and sports) and leisure activities (particularly in reading, sports, extracurricular activities, and instrumental music). We are also interested in the impact of participation in such leisure activities on subsequent development. Even more broadly we are interested in the psychological and contextual (family, school, work) influences on social development in the second and third decades of life. Finally, we are interested in the role of transitions in life-course development. Our work involves both qualitative and quantitative methods used with longitudinal research designs. Most of the work of the program has focused on the school and the family as primary developmental contexts. We are beginning more work on the neighborhood, distal influence of social economic status, the peer group, early sexual behavior, and activity settings as developmental contexts. Specific projects are described below.
Ontogeny of Self and Task Concept and Activity Choice . This project is a longitudinal, field-based study of the development of children and adolescents' self esteem and activity preferences across four activity domains common to childhood experience: academic, social, instrumental music, and sport. Earlier studies in the academic achievement domain indicated that both parents' beliefs and children's perceptions of their competence, expectations for success, task difficulty perceptions, and task value perceptions are critical influences on achievement behavior and choices among children in grades 5-12. This longitudinal study extended the work to younger children and a broader set of children's activities. The study was designed to look at four basic issues: 1) the development of self and task beliefs within and across domains; 2) the role of these beliefs in shaping children's behavioral choices across the domains; 3) the antecedents of parents' and teachers' beliefs about their children in each of these domains; and 4) the impact of parenting and teaching styles and of teacher and parent beliefs, values, and perceptions on children's developing self and task beliefs. We have followed a sample of about 800 children, their parents and teachers for 13 years using both questionnaire and interview procedures. Objective measures of the children's competence in math, language arts, and sport/physical skill were obtained. Subjective indicators of the children's competence were obtained from teacher and parent ratings. Detailed information about the school and home social and material context were obtained from parents, children, and teachers. In Year 3, a within-family sub-study of siblings was added. In the future, we are planning a replication of this data using new samples from the U.S., England, Spain, and Australia.
Transition into Adulthood — The Michigan Study of Adolescent and Adult Life Transitions (MSALT). How do social and academic experiences at school, at home, at work, and with one's peers relate to work and educational options and to psychological adjustment during adolescence and the early twenties? We have used the Eccles Expectancy — Value Model of Achievement-Related Choices to study questions such as these. This model has been used over the last 15 years to study educational and role-related choices among children and adolescents. In 1983, we began a longitudinal study of adolescent development with a group of fifth and sixth graders recruited from 10 different school districts in Southeastern Michigan. In the spring of 1990, we collected the sixth wave of this study for the 2,381 adolescents still remaining in our school districts. In 1992 and 1993, when our sample was approximately 20-21 years old, we gathered the seventh wave of information. We selected this age because it is likely to be particularly stressful for those adolescents not attending college, and particularly difficult for youth who have experienced less than optimal development during early and middle adolescence. As a result, the poorest families in this country are the families of non-college educated youth who dropped out of high school prior to graduation. Employers are reluctant to put these adolescents into career track jobs, and society provides very few opportunities for post-high school vocational training and support other than college. We know very little about how these youth cope with this transitional period.
Passages through Adolescence: Education Outcomes . This project uses the MSALT data to identify those aspects of the environment at Time 1 that are associated with subsequent characteristics of both the family and the adolescent. It focuses on which family and/or personal characteristics are facilitative of positive adaptation and growth and which are predictive of less than optimal development. Because our longitudinal design includes six waves of data and a rich array of measures collected both from the parents and the adolescents themselves, as well as from teachers and school records, we are able to study complex, dynamic change. To understand adolescent development, we need to understand the complex interplay of changes within the family system and the school. The course of adolescent development depends on characteristics of the adolescent's family, the adolescent him/herself, and the school environments in which the adolescent develops. This data set provides information on such influences.
Maryland Adolescent Development In Context Study (MADICS) This sample of approximately 1000 is comprised of Adrican-American (61%) and European-American (35%) adolescent and their families of comparable SES distributions (making it possible to look independently at the impact of family income and ethnic group membership on occupational choice). We have 5 waves of data (beginning in 1991 when the students were in the 7th grade and again after grade 7, after grade 8, during grade 11, and one year post high school) gathered from the adolescents, their caregivers (parents, guardians, or others), and thier school records. We have just completed gathering a sixth wave of data (at three years post high school) specifically focused on college experiences with a major focus on the students' perceptions of factors likely to either enhance or undermine thier interest in information technology, as well as other college majors and occupations. Information was collected from the adolescents, their parents, and their schools on: (1) psychological adjustment and mental health; (2) social, musical, athletic, and academic (math and other subjects) competencies and performance; (3) self perceptions, sense of efficacy, and identity formation, (including both personal and social identities linked to: ethnicity, gender and religion); (4) educational and occupational goals and expectations; (5) expectations regarding discrimination and other barriers to achieving one's goals, as well as beliefs regarding one's ability to overcome these barriers; (6) involvement in leisure activities related to computer use, as well as other skill domains like athletics and instrumental music; and (7) complete educational [including courses taken and college major] and employment histories. We have added a series of items directly linked to technology to wave 5 and our current wave. These indicators include stereotypes about the types of individuals who go into information technology, stereotypes about jobs in information technology, confidence and interest in various types of information technology jobs, experiences in computer science, information technology, engineering and math courses at college, and exposure to either encouragement or discouragement about majoring in an information technology subject or aspiring to a job in information technology. This data set will allow us differences in entry into and persistence in the IT workforce.
Study of African-American and European-American Adolescent Development in Multiple Contexts. Adolescence is a critical period for the development of behaviors and attitudes. Understanding the factors influencing pathways through adolescence requires a careful look at the development of typical adolescents in various social contexts. The need for this information is especially marked for adolescents of color. The Maryland Study of Adolescent Development in Multiple Contexts was designed to collect such information, from an economically and ethnically diverse sample of adolescents and their families, about the influences of multiple levels of social context on a wide range of developmental indicators. The study design was guided by theories of person-environment fit, stress and coping, and self-schema and identity formation, as well as by expectancy-value models of behavioral choice and transactional/ecological theories of development. The project has five major goals: (1) providing a comprehensive description of various developmental trajectories through adolescence; (2) testing the utility of the Eccles et al. (1983) expectancy/value model of choice behavior and of self and identity theories for predicting individual differences in pathways through adolescence; (3) linking variations in these trajectories to experiences in four salient social contexts (family, peers, schools, neighborhood) in terms of the following contextual characteristics: (a) structure/control, (b) support for autonomy, (c) emotional support, (d) opportunities and risks, and (e) shared beliefs, values, and expectations, as well as on the developmental fit between changes in both individuals and contexts; (4) investigating the interplay between these social spheres of experience as they influence development in terms of the following cross-contextual characteristics and processes: (a) compatibility vs. discrepancy, (b) synergistic vs. compensatory influences, and (c) management of multiple contexts by parents, peers, and the adolescents themselves; and (5) extending our understanding of goals 1-4 to African-American adolescents with a focus on both general developmental processes and the specific dynamics associated with ethnic identity, prejudice, discrimination, and social stratification.This longitudinal study of approximately 1400 African-American (61%) and European-American (35%) adolescents and their families began in fall 1991 as the adolescents entered middle school. Five waves of data have been collected from the adolescents, their caregivers, older siblings, school personnel, school records, and the 1990 census databanks via in-home and telephone interviews and self-administered questionnaires. The data were collected when the youth were in grades 7, 8, 9, 11, and one year post-high school graduation. Data is currently being collected on a sixth wave. Analysis of these data is underway.
Social Identity Consortium. The Social Identity Consortium is working group funded by the Russell Sage Foundation (PIs=Diane Ruble, Kay Deaux, and Jacquelynne Eccles) to advance collaborative research and scholarship on social identity. The working group is comprised of scholars (mostly psychologists) from at least five colleges and universities nationwide, all of whom have established expertise in some area of research related to social identity. As a group, the consortium's efforts focus primarily on understanding the effects of social context on the willingness of immigrant, minority and white citizens to identify with and engage behaviorially in government, community, educational institutions, work organizations and families. The consortium operates with the assumption that peoples' identification with institutions may lead to their greater involvement in those institutions. Thus, the immediate goal of the consortium is to explicate the psychology of social identification through collaborative, interdisciplinary research efforts in a variety of social institutions; a secondary goal is to make recommendations for increasing peoples' engagement in institutions, particularly through social identity interventions.
Women, Minorities and Technology. Why are women and minorities underrepresented in the IT labor force? We will address this issue in terms of three sub-questions: (a) what are the psychological meditators of both gender and ethnic group differences in entry into and persistence in the IT labor force? (b) What are the family and school forces that underlie the gender and ethnic group differences in these psychological mediators? (c) How do experiences in tertiary educational settings and in IT work settings influence gender and ethnic group differences in entry into and persistence in the IT labor forces? We propose three data analytic projects designed to answer these questions. In 1983, Eccles et al. outlined a theoretical framework based on expectancies, values, and achievement behaviors to study questions such as these. This framework has two components: a psychological component and a socialization component. For 17 years, we have used this framework to study educational and occupational choices using longitudinal survey designs that include multiple indicators from children, adolescents, young adults, parents, teachers, and school records. We have 3 large longitudinal data sets that we will use to assess the utility of the Eccles et al. frameworks for understanding the under-representation of females and minoriteies in occupational fields related to informational technology.
The director of the program is Jacquelynne Eccles (Psychology and Education). For more information about the program, contact her ( jeccles@umich.edu) , the co-director, Pamela Davis-Kean (pdakean@umich.edu), or the program administrator, Loralyn Rudy ( lrudy@umich.edu; 734/647-5282).