Dr. Gabriel Kuperminc’s research program examines the psychological adjustment and school achievement of adolescents from ethnically diverse backgrounds. He is particularly interested in the social-ecological processes and normative life stresses that affect developmental outcomes across the transitions from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. One of the most important processes affecting psychological and school adjustment, according to Dr. Kuperminc, is the adolescent’s evolving relationships with parents and peers. This process is affected by multiple stressors that occur within the individual (e.g., puberty), as well as in family (e.g., parental divorce), school (e.g., increasing academic demands), neighborhood (e.g., exposure to danger), and cultural (e.g., immigration and acculturation) contexts.

In a study to be published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Dr. Kuperminc and his colleagues examined the normative developmental processes of 448 White, Black, and Latino girls and boys 11-14 years of age. They found overall similarity in changes over time across ethnic groups in terms of relatedness, self-definition, and psychological adjustment, although Black and Latino youth reported more overall adjustment difficulties. Black youth reported less positive relationships with parents. Lower SES youth reported less positive peer relationships than others. There were ethnic group differences in changes to school adjustment, even after controlling for SES, suggesting a cultural variation in which often cited declines in school adjustment during middle school characterize White Adolescents to a greater degree than Black or Latino adolescents.  Ethnicity moderated associations of relatedness and self-definition with psychological and school adjustment such that Black and Latino youth appeared particularly vulnerable to experiences that threaten closeness and trust in relationships.  White youth, in contrast, appeared more vulnerable to experiences that threaten sense of self. Results pointed to potentially important situational and cultural differences in maladaptive and adaptive developmental processes across ethnicity.

In a second study, Dr. Kuperminc focused on factors affecting the school success of immigrant Latino adolescents.  Drawing from research on filial responsibility and risk, and protective factors, Dr. Kuperminc and his colleagues built a model that accounts for both negative and positive developmental outcomes.  For example, stressors linked to immigration, such as poverty and discrimination, may lead to a marked increase in the sense of responsibility an adolescent may feel to his or her family.  This may lead to the adolescent spending more time working to earn money for the family or acting as the role of translator and liaison to the English speaking community.  These activities related to filial responsibility may make it more difficult for the adolescent to spend time in school and peer activities.  At the same time, however, Latino youths who perform major caregiving tasks in the family also appear to derive an increased sense of personal and interpersonal competence and their teachers rate them as having more assertive social skills than others, and being more task oriented and better able to manage frustration in school. 

Dr. Kuperminc’s ongoing research involves the development and implementation of effective programs that reduce the incidence of problem behaviors in adolescence. He considers it important to conduct action research that 1) addresses real-life problems as they occur in community settings, and 2) draws from and builds on knowledge and theory about developmental processes. One such effort is the Youth Development Program. This program is a school-based group mentoring intervention that provides a culturally sensitive setting for positive youth development in the most ethnically diverse high school in Georgia. It represents one of the first rigorous evaluations of group-mentoring, and focuses on identifying program effects on social, behavioral, and academic outcomes for high school students considered to be at risk for poor academic attainment and social adjustment difficulties. It is expected that youth participating in a mentoring program with college-aged partners will demonstrate improvements in 1) quality of interpersonal relationships with peers and parents; 2) interpersonal skills and prosocial behavior; and 3) school engagement.

Dr. Kuperminc, an associate professor of community and developmental psychology, was recently awarded a William T. Grant Foundation Faculty Scholars Award to pursue his work concerned with the social and school adjustment of Immigrant Latino adolescents. He collaborates with Georgia State faculty members in the departments of Psychology (Gregory Jurkovic, Julia Perilla, Christopher Henrich) and Anthropology (Arthur Murphy), as well as students from Psychology (Duane House, Rebecca Lapidus, Lawanda Cummings, Anabel Alvarez, and Adam Darnell), Professional Counseling (Bernardo Roque), and Anthropology (Dana Tottenham Warren, Shannon King).