Raising children is a challenging task for anyone; however, unique socialization factors, including confidence and skills, are needed to competently raise Black children in a society plagued with racial strife. Racial socialization—or the process by which caregivers convey implicit and explicit messages about the meaning of race as well as how to cope with racial discrimination—has been described as the most critical parenting practice undertaken in Black families to safeguard their children’s well-being. In 2020, “The Talk”—a colloquial name for racial socialization—made the news after the violent deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and many others.
Racial socialization has historically been measured by the frequency or quantity of discussion. However, “The Initial Development and Validation of the Racial Socialization Competency Scale: Quality and Quantity,” an article by Riana Elyse Anderson, Shawn C. T. Jones, and Howard Stevenson in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychologyopens in new window, advances a new way to measure “The Talk” through the quality of these conversations. Their study used the lens of competence, including confidence, skills, and stress, to investigate the reliability and validity of the newly developed Racial Socialization Competency Scale (RaSCS). As posited by racial encounter coping appraisal and socialization theory, the RaSCS consists of three factors representing three novel dimensions of racial socialization competency. Twenty-eight items were compiled to represent dimensions that typically appear in the racial socialization literature (e.g., cultural socialization or racial pride, preparation for bias, promotion of mistrust, egalitarianism). For each item, caregivers had three stems in which they endorsed the following conceptual constructs: confidence (“I believe I can”), skills (“I am/would be prepared to”), and stress (“I am/would be stressed to”). A sample confidence item might read “I believe I can teach my child to engage rather than walk away from a negative racial encounter with another person,” ranked on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 = low belief and 5 = high belief.
Responses to the RaSCS were collected from 361 self-identified Black primary caretakers across the United States. After factor analysis, three scales and 27 items were maintained. Evidence was consistently found for two subscales within the stress dimension, namely Call to Action and General racial socialization stressors. This finding was particularly interesting because it indicates that not all racial socialization messages are delivered with the same amount of stress, and that strategies that encourage youth to actively engage in behaviors (e.g., “teach my child to speak up if they witness peers being racially mistreated”) rather than receive transmitted racial messages (e.g., “share my emotions about my experiences of negative racial encounters”) are more stress-laden for parents. Dimensions were also related to hypothesized constructs, including overall stress, racial socialization frequency, and self-efficacy, yet the correlations were not perfect, suggesting that racial socialization strategies differ from general competencies assessed in Black parents.
Future directions and recommendations on the measure’s use, particularly in the context of interventions, are discussed in the article. Anderson et al. plan to evaluate the RaSCS for parents of varying backgrounds as well as assess it in interventions in a pre-posttest evaluation to explore whether racial socialization competency is a malleable construct. A competency perspective that allows families to engage in racial socialization with an improvement-oriented framework could be useful in interventions to improve familial confidence and skills while reducing stress over time. During this challenging time, having such confidence, skills, and reduced stress will only improve the ability of psychological providers and researchers to support Black families appropriately.
Note: This article is in the Social Psychology and Social Processes topic area. View more articles in the Social Psychology and Social Processes topic area.