Deborah Rivas-Drake's research is broadly concerned with how adolescents and young adults make sense of their place in society. She draws from developmental perspectives that attend to cultural and ecological/contextual factors and examines variation in processes both within and across diverse ethnic and racial groups. Currently, one line of inquiry explores how schools, families, peers, and communities influence the development of ethnic and racial identity, and how such identities shape youths' academic and psychological outcomes. She is interested in, for instance, the ways in which parents' efforts to socialize their children around issues of ethnicity and race (i.e., ethnic-racial socialization) intersect with youths' own experiences outside the family context - such as when they experience discrimination in school and peer settings. Her work also examines the extent to which ethnic identity can buffer youth from the pernicious consequences of discrimination on academic and psychological outcomes. A second line of inquiry explores the contributions of contextual and individual factors in the educational attainment of Latino youth across diverse U.S. communities.
Prior to joining the University of Michigan, Rivas-Drake was an Assistant Professor at Brown University and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education at New York University.
She received her Ph.D. in Education and Psychology from the University of Michigan.
