Aryn M. Dotterer

Utah State University | USU · Department of Human Development and Family Studies

The extraordinary disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic created a unique context to investigate the links between family communication and adolescent adjustment. Given that widespread stay-at-home orders increased time spent in the family setting, the present study examined reciprocal links between older and younger adolescent siblings’...

Study goals were to assess: (1) the development of academic interests from middle childhood through late adolescence, (2) the degree to which junior high and high school transitions, parents' educational expectations, interests, and education, were related to changes in academic interests, and (3) the longitudinal links between youth's academic int...

Discrimination because of one’s stigmatized identities and personal characteristics can thwart healthy adolescent development. Little is known about the role of disclosure, including whether adolescents talk about their discrimination experiences with close relational partners (i.e., parents, siblings, friends) and whether disclosure mitigates the...

Objective This study examined measurement equivalence of parental microprotections in Black, Latinx, and White families. Background Microprotections refer to the small daily caring, supportive, and loving behaviors Black parents engage in to counteract the negative effects of racism and discrimination. It is possible that this parenting practice a...

This paper examines the moments of third space that emerged during the first year of an afterschool program for refugee-background-background youth focused on physics and computing through hands-on, culturally relevant and sustaining participation in cosmic ray research. In March 2020, what was intended to be a 2 day per week in-person, hands-on ST...

Restrictions associated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic created a host of short- and long-term economic challenges for families. Despite their ubiquity during the early pandemic, knowledge on the developmental impacts of pandemic-related financial hardships on adolescents’ adjustment is lacking. Guided by family stress and life course persp...

This linguistic anthropological case study examines one episode of play involving refugee-background teenagers participating in an informal STEM learning experience. This empirical case shows how the disciplinary practices of cosmic ray detector building were productively interwoven with spontaneous play directed by participating youth. The analysi...

The U.S. education system presents challenges for refugee-background youth from minoritized racial backgrounds. Cultural differences between home and school, socioeconomic challenges, and socio-emotional challenges persist for refugee-background youth in K-12 classrooms. What is even more challenging is navigating through the socio-political and st...

Trends in past research note parental involvement in education tends to decline as students get older. This targeted review draws on the bioecological model of human development and parental role construction to understand how parent involvement changes across developmental periods. Three distinct issues were identified from research on the effecti...

This paper explores one methodological question that emerged during a linguistic ethnographic study within an informal after-school program aimed at offering culturally and linguistically sustaining science learning experiences to multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual refugee youth. The authors were participant-observers both collaborating on...

The stereotype inoculation model proposes that environments primarily comprised of underrepresented in-group members afford them protection against the inimical effects of stereotypes. We conducted a macrolevel test of this model by examining the conditional effects of university context on students’ perceptions of threatening race-science, technol...

Parents are in a powerful position to teach sexual topics to their children, promoting positive sex attitudes and lifelong sexual health. However, parents may lack sexual knowledge and confidence to address such topics. This study, grounded in social learning theory, tested the effects of an active learning intervention to increase parental efficac...

Racial and ethnic achievement gaps contribute to the lack of underrepresented minorities in STEM-related careers. This research is grounded in the expectancy value model of achievement motivation which posits that motivation is influenced by social-cognitive variables such as self-efficacy and beliefs about the usefulness or utility of the task. Th...

This paper explores the experiences of two female youth participating in a virtually-delivered afterschool STEM program for refugee youth designed to enact culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy. The program threads together cosmic ray research in physics with Ph.D. physicists, training in coding and computer science to support students'...

The purpose of this article was to explore how family chaos, parenting processes, parent–child relationship qualities, and sibling relationship qualities changed before versus the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants included one parent and two adolescent-aged children from 682 families (2,046 participants). Parents and youth partici...

The current study examined changes in adolescents' school bonding from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic and its individual, parenting, and family-level correlates. Participants were two adolescents (50% male; Mage = 14 years) and one parent (85% female; Mage = 45 years) from 682 families (N = 2046) from an ongoing longitudinal study. Adolesce...

College student parents represent a unique population because they are typically low-income, accrue more debt than traditional students, and must balance the role of student and parent. Using a mixed methods design, this study examined the relation between college student parents’ stress and distress in their relationships with their children and e...

School choice has received national attention in the United States from policymakers and professionals as a way to improve parents’ social capital and subsequent academic outcomes for adolescents. However, limited work has empirically tested the links among school choice, social capital, and academic outcomes, particularly for high school students....

Objectives The transition to adolescence is associated with decreases in student achievement. One factor that may mitigate these decreases is parent involvement. The present study examined whether ethnicity, type of involvement (school-based involvement [SBI] vs. home-based involvement [HBI]), and their interaction predicted GPA. Methods This stud...

Building upon psychological momentum theory, we draw an analogy between motivational constructs proposed herein and the physical principles of mass, inertia, and momentum. From these principles, we derived constructs representing academic inertia in states of both low and high momentum. The sample consisted of 105 African American college students...

Discrepancies between parents’ and adolescents’ reports in parental knowledge of adolescents’ daily activities and whereabouts are common and have implications for adolescents’ well-being and school success. Grounded in a family systems perspective utilizing reports from parents and adolescents, the goal of this study was to explore the extent to w...

This study examined the indirect mechanisms linking family stressors (i.e., negative family life events, paternal psychological distress, and couple conflict) to children’s later externalizing behavior problems through fathers’ warm parenting behaviors among Korean families. Three waves of longitudinal data were drawn from the Panel Study on Korean...

Gaps in educational outcomes between racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups persist in the United States, and parental involvement is often cited as an important avenue for improving outcomes among racially/ethnically diverse adolescents. This study utilized data from the Education Longitudinal Study 2002–2013 (56% female, N = 4429), which followed...

The transition to college is a salient ecological shift in emerging adults’ lives that has important implications for renegotiating parental involvement as youth gain independence while navigating the world of higher education. However, the construct of parental involvement itself lacks clear characterization in literatures spanning higher educatio...

Previous research highlights the importance and pervasiveness of racial discrimination for minority youth in the United States. Adolescents may experience either personal or group race-based discrimination. While past research found both forms of discrimination are harmful to well-being it is unknown whether parental microprotections, which may buf...

Rooted in achievement goal theory, the buffering hypothesis posits that contextual factors serve to moderate the deleterious effects of personal achievement goals on relevant outcomes. The present study sought to test this hypothesis by examining the interactive effects of classroom affiliation perceptions and personal achievement goals for conduct...

It is well established that parental knowledge contributes to adolescents’ well-being and school success and scholars have noted that parents and adolescents report different levels of knowledge. Discrepancies in parental knowledge have implications for adolescent outcomes such as risk behaviors, but little is known about the implications of knowle...

The purpose of this study was to explore the levels of positive youth development (PYD) among Indiana 4-H club participants. Questionnaires were collected from a convenience sample of [State] youth (n = 453). Findings indicated that youth who participated in the 4-H program reported significantly higher total positive youth development than those w...

Parent involvement is an integral, but potentially problematic, aspect of this transition. Therefore, the need exists for campus-level parent education in the context of intercollegiate athletics. The present research was designed to address key stakeholders' perceptions of parent involvement in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athle...

Student-athletes have to balance their sport, academic, and social lives during the transition to college and parent involvement is an integral, but potentially problematic, aspect of this transition. The present study investigated how key parent involvement factors may be associated with positive developmental outcomes in NCAA Division I student-a...

The present study examined the extent to which perceived racial/ethnic discrimination at school was directly and indirectly (via parenting practices) related to academic adjustment among racial and ethnic minority adolescents. Participants (58% female) were 208 minority students (63% African American, 19% Latino, 18% Multiracial) in grades 6-8 from...

The present study examined the extent to which parent involvement in education was directly and indirectly (via school engagement) related to academic outcomes in an effort to more fully understand the school experiences of urban adolescents. Participants (80% racial/ethnic minority; n = 108) were in grades 6, 7 or 8. In the Fall and subsequent Spr...

Parental educational involvement during middle school has received increased attention from researchers and policymakers because of its links to a variety of academic outcomes. Despite this increased attention, parental involvement has been inconsistently linked to academic outcomes among adolescents, indicating different types and levels of involv...

Guided by developmental and sociological frameworks, the present study investigated two interrelated research questions, namely, (a) is helicopter parenting (HP) a unidimensional or multidimensional construct and (b) is parental payment of college education associated with freshmen’s reports of HP? Participants (58% female) included 190 first-semes...

Research Findings: Grounded in the investment model and informed by the integrative theory of the study of minority children, this study used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort data set, a nationally representative sample of young children, to investigate whether the association between socioeconomic status (family income and mater...

This study explored trajectories of African American youths' academic functioning and assessed whether changes in parent–adolescent relationships were associated with changes in youths' academic functioning. The data were drawn from a 3-year longitudinal study of gender socialization and development in two-parent African American families and inclu...

Guided by the integrative model of parenting, the present study investigated the relationship between parental monitoring and racial/ethnic minority adolescents' school engagement and academic motivation as a function of parental warmth, and explored whether these associations varied for boys and girls. Participants (60 % female) were 208 sixth thr...

This study examined the link between socioeconomic status (SES) and school readiness, testing whether parenting (maternal sensitivity and negative behavior/intrusiveness) and financial stress mediated this association and if race moderated these paths. Participants included 164 mother-child dyads from African American and European American families...

Concerns about school readiness especially among children from low-income families have resulted in massive funding of state pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programmes. Pre-K programmes differ in whether they are universal (i.e. available to all children) or targeted (i.e. offered only to children with specific risk factors). Due to the lack of empirical...

Black and White middle-aged adults typically are in a pivot position of providing support to generations above and below. Racial differences in support to each generation in the family remain unclear, however. Different factors may account for racial differences in support of grown children versus aging parents. Middle-aged adults (aged 40-60 years...

Classroom context and school engagement are significant predictors of academic achievement. These factors are especially important for academically at-risk students. Grounded in an ecological systems perspective, this study examined links between classroom context, school engagement, and academic achievement among early adolescents. We took a multi...

Study goals were to assess: (1) the development of academic interests from middle childhood through late adolescence, (2) the degree to which junior high and high school transitions, parents' educational expectations, interests, and education, were related to changes in academic interests, and (3) the longitudinal links between youth's academic int...

This study investigated the links between racial discrimination and school engagement and the roles of racial socialization and ethnic identity as protective factors in those linkages in a sample of 148, sixth through twelfth grade African American adolescents from working and middle-class two-parent families. In home interviews, youth described th...

From an ecological perspective, daily activities are both a cause and a consequence of youth development. Research on youth activities directs attention to the processes through which daily activities may have an impact on youth, including: (a) providing chances to learn and practice skills; (b) serving as a forum for identity development; (c) affo...

The authors examined the associations between socioeconomic status (SES), race, maternal sensitivity, and maternal negative-intrusive behaviors and language development in a sample selected to reduce the typical confound between race and SES (n = 146). Mother-child interactions were observed at 12 and 24 months (coded by randomly assigned African A...

This study charted the development of gendered personality qualities and activity interests from age 7 to age 19 in 364 first- and secondborn siblings from 185 White, middle/working-class families, assessed links between time in gendered social contexts (with mother, father, female peers, and male peers) and gender development, and tested whether c...

We examined reciprocal associations between parent-adolescent conflict and academic achievement over a 2-year period. Participants were mothers, fathers, and adolescents from predominantly White, working and middle class families (N = 168). After accounting for previous academic achievement, parent—adolescent conflict predicted relative declines in...

The connection between out-of-school activities and school engagement was examined in 140, 6th through 9th grade African American adolescents. Youth’s out-of-school activities were measured with a series of 7 nightly phone calls and focused on time in structured (homework, academically-oriented, extracurricular/sports) and unstructured (watching te...

Mothers' and fathers' cultural socialization and bias preparation with older (M=13.9 years) and younger (M=10.31 years) siblings were studied in 162 two-parent, African American families. Analyses examined whether parental warmth and offspring age and gender were linked to parental practices and whether parents' warmth, spouses' racial socializatio...

Colleges and universities conduct summer workshops for high school students to develop career awareness and motivate students to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. As such, Science Workshops are conducted by Purdue University to provide high school students opportunities to learn science knowledge and explore c...