Session: Racialized Experience and Its Influence on Development of Asian American Adolescents and Young Adults (Society for Social Work and Research 24th Annual Conference - Reducing Racial and Economic Inequality)

Asian Americans are the fastest growing population and projected to double its size, reaching 14% of the U.S. population by 2065, when they will be the largest group of immigrants. However, they remain understudied and often excluded in discourse on race and immigration. This organized symposium comprised of three papers aims to fill this gap by investigating racialized experience of Asian American adolescents and young adults and its influence on their developmental outcomes. The papers used data from the Midwest Longitudinal Study of Asian American Families (ML-SAAF), a longitudinal study of Filipino and Korean American youth and their parents living in a Midwest metropolitan area that examines the impact of culture, race/ethnicity and immigration on youth development.

The first paper investigates whether and how the conflicting stereotypes, i.e., model minority stereotype (MMS) and perpetual foreigner stereotype (PFS), together explains the Asian American paradox, a pattern of having good grades and fewer externalizing problems but more mental health problems. This study moves beyond the racial binary framework by investigating the influence of multi-dimensional socio-historical factors of racial positionality of Asian Americans and its impact on development. The second paper investigates a longitudinal trend of mental health among Asian American adolescents and young adults and identifies explanatory factors that may account for the increased vulnerability of mental distress among this population, such as parent-child conflict and racial discrimination. The third study investigates the pathways in which parental practices of racial/ethnic socialization influence mental health outcomes, mediated by racial discrimination. This study is unique in that it examines multiple perspectives of racial/ethnic socialization, i.e., those of youth and parent. The findings from these papers together provide compelling empirical evidence that contributes to our understanding of the racialized experience of Asian Americans and its complex impact on Asian American youth development. These findings provide important policy and intervention implications to target the negativity of racism and racial discrimination.