Researching Adolescent Pathways

RAP (Researching Adolescent Pathways) is a Research Program funded by the National Science Foundation and The Spencer Foundation, and is located in Hamilton Hall, in the Sociology Department.  It supports postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, with current primary emphasis on quantitative research.  RAP is affiliated with the Southern Spencer Initiative, a consortium of North Carolina researchers from Duke, UNC-Central, UNC-Charlotte, and other universities.

The primary focus of RAP is on racial and economic inequalities among American adolescents, and there are five main objectives.  One is to understand adolescents? views about what they consider as being important guidelines for their own behavior.  Racial, as well as gender differences help to account for variation among adolescents with respect to the values that they attach to community responsibility, individual achievement, and personal integrity.
 
A second is to understand the antecedents and consequences of performance on achievement tests and how these vary for students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. 

A third objective of the research is to expand the conception of delinquency to study many ways that teens "get into trouble," and this broader conception leads to conclusions that are strikingly different from media reports and public perception. 

A fourth objective is to analyze variation in schools and neighborhoods to account for adolescents? outcomes, and how this variation operates directly and indirectly, through parenting, students? own characteristics and other factors. A final objective of the quantitative analyses is to map adolescents? life-spaces as they relate to racial differences and that include their social relations, curriculum choices, and extracurricular activities.

While school reformers have focused their attention on testing and the progress of individual students, our main interest is the school as a social experience and how adolescents learn to be members of a complex society.  Our research supports the conclusion that social pluralism and cultural diversity enrich learning experiences and do not impair academic achievement. For information about this research, contact Judith Blau, jrblau@email.unc.edu, or 919-962-5603.