This chapter focuses on the micro- and meso-level experiences of academically at-risk African American adolescents in a distressed urban inner city. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the academic achievement issues of African American adolescents within Flint, Michigan. Building upon solid empirical literature, we seek to fill the gaps in three ways: 1) exploring African American adolescents’ contextual-level social support systems within an economically distressed city, 2) using a person-oriented approach to understand the variation in African American adolescents’ contextual-level support systems, and 3) understanding how contextual-level social support systems impact achievement motivation beliefs over time.
Project: Strengths-Based Assets of Black Adolescents
Citation
Butler-Barnes, S. T., Hurd, N., & Zimmerman, M. A. (2013). Flint adolescent study: A longitudinal examination of social support and achievement motivational beliefs of African American Adolescents. In C. Camp Yeakey, V. L. Sanders Thompson, & A. Wells (Eds.), Urban ills: Twenty-first-century complexities of urban living in global contexts (Vol. 2, pp. 133–152). Lanham, MD: Lexington.