新作坊 Humanity Innovation and Social Practice

Data analytic strategies in research on ethnic minority youth.

摘要：

Explores a variety of approaches to the analysis of data on ethnic background in studies of adolescent development and points out the assumptions, advantages, and problems inherent in different techniques. Four basic approaches to the use of information of youngster's ethnic backgrounds in the formulation of data analytic strategies are described. The authors argue against the use of ethnicity as a grouping variable in the tradition of social address designs on the grounds that this approaches rarely yields insight into fundamental developmental processes. They also argue against the use of ethnicity as a control variable in developmental research for both conceptual and methodological reasons. To the extent that the authors believe that context matters in the study of development, they also believe that controlling ethnicity hinders, rather than enhances, our understanding. Alternatives to the social address and nuisance approaches to handling information on ethnicity are described.