Cultural Change, Mental Health & Academic Achievement

Eileen Anderson-Fye

What are the relationships between mental health and academic achievement for high school students undergoing rapid cultural change (i.e. immigration and globalization)? This project investigates the relationship between mental health and secondary school achievement among African-descended and Latino Belizean adolescents undergoing rapid cultural change in Los Angeles and in Belize to pilot measures and gather data that will subsequently be employed in a larger, longitudinal comparative project addressing this question. In the Los Angeles sample, survey and interview data collected over the past decade with African-descended Belizean students, their parents, and their educators will be re-analyzed to examine the correlations and self-report links between mental health and academic achievement outcomes. In the Belizean sample, culturally appropriate mental health measures will be piloted and correlated with academic achievement outcomes. Ethnographic and interview data from over a decade of longitudinal work in Belize will supplement these measures. The data from the two field sites will provide a strong foundation for a future, comprehensive prospective longitudinal study examining the effects of cultural models on developmental trajectories of mental health and high school academic achievement. These data will inform educational policy and practice regarding student well-being among the current wave of “new immigration.”

About Eileen Anderson-Fye

Eileen Anderson-Fye is assistant professor of anthropology and Associate Director of the Schubert Center for Child Development at Case Western Reserve University. Her research focuses on adolescent well-being in contexts of rapid cultural change (i.e. globalization and immigration). Anderson-Fye has completed over 10 years of longitudinal ethnographic research with high school girls in Belize examining their ethnopsychology, academic achievement, and mental health in the context of globalizing cultural change. More recently, she has been working on a research project with African-descended Belizean immigrants in Los Angeles examining their transitions to adulthood. Her current work sets the stage for comparative study of Belizean adolescents in their natal country and after immigration to the US in order to understand the effects of globalization and immigration on academic achievement and well-being, with particular attention to the effects of gender, ethnicity, and race across mid-adolescence. Anderson-Fye is a psychological anthropologist who received her AB in American Civilization from Brown University and her M.Ed and EdD in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She completed postdoctoral training at UCLA in the Program of Culture, Brain, and Development where she was based in the Department of Psychiatry’s Center for Culture and Health. Her work has been supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, NIH, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Foundation for Psychocultural Research, the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and research institutes in Eating Disorders, Children’s Studies, and International Education at Harvard University.