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Motivational interviewing (MI), a therapy strategy used to guide students to help students better understand how to develop their social emotional learning (SEL) skills to make positive choices that resolve social conflict, bodes promising for helping youth to cultivate the social and emotional skills needed to address bullying, peer drama, and other issues affecting their mental, physical, and emotional health. Bulldog Solution, Inc., a Chicago-based organization, utilized MI research-informed approach to increase students' social conflict management and leadership skills through self-awareness and self-discovery, as a mechanism for preventing bullying and supporting the social and emotional growth of young people. This study presents emerging themes resulting from a 9-week, motivational interview and SEL-based program titled, "Peace Over Drama," implemented with middle school students (sixth–seventh–eighth grade) with disabilities and/or at risk for disability-identification (n = 17) in one Chicago middle school on the south side. Implications for school-based prevention models and scaling of similar SEL and MI programing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose/Objective: Graduate students and faculty with disabilities are underrepresented in psychology and face many barriers in graduate education and training. Teaching is a major component of graduate training and faculty preparation, but there is a dearth of research on the teaching experiences of psychology graduate students with disabilities. The objective of this study was to explore the teaching experiences of psychology graduate students with disabilities. Research Method/Design: We conducted semistructured interviews with 12 disabled psychology graduate students who had teaching experience as part of their graduate programs. Interviews were analyzed using phenomenological coding. Results: Common themes among participants were lack of disability disclosure; lack of accommodations for teaching and guidance of how to receive them; and supportive and nonsupportive resources and mentors in their graduate teaching experiences. Conclusions/Implications: Disabled graduate student teachers often lack environments and resources where they can receive disability-specific support and accommodations for teaching. Faculty and programs should develop and promote disability-affirmative training cultures that actively support graduate student teachers with disabilities, including departmental cultures that de-stigmatize disability disclosure and accommodations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American families navigate not only everyday stressors and adversities but also unique sociocultural stressors (e.g., "toxic upstream waters" like oppression). These adverse conditions are consequences of the historical vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow laws, often manifested as inequities in wealth, housing, wages, employment, access to healthcare, and quality education. Despite these challenges, African American families have developed resilience using strength-based adaptive coping strategies, to some extent, to filter these waters. To advance the field of resilience research, we focused on the following questions: (1) what constitutes positive responses to adversity?; (2) how is resilience defined conceptually and measured operationally?; (3) how has the field of resilience evolved?; (4) who defines what, when, and how responses are manifestations of resilience, instead of, for example, resistance? How can resistance, which at times leads to positive adaptations, be incorporated into the study of resilience?; and (5) are there case examples that demonstrate ways to address structural oppression and the pernicious effects of racism through system-level interventions, thereby changing environmental situations that sustain toxic waters requiring acts of resilience to survive and thrive? We end by exploring how a re-conceptualization of resilience requires a paradigm shift and new methodological approaches to understand ways in which preventive interventions move beyond focusing on families' capacity to navigate oppression and target systems and structures that maintain these toxic waters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students with disabilities (SWDs) are disproportionately at-risk for bullying victimization and perpetration, yet there is a lack of educator-focused professional development targeting prevention for these students. This project sought to address gaps in training through the creation of four online professional development modules: (1) understanding bullying among SWDs, (2) examining risk characteristics, (3) establishing school and classroom prevention strategies, and (4) individual prevention. These modules were iteratively developed with feedback from teachers and staff, incorporating the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework to focus on interventions rooted in social emotional learning (SEL), and emphasizing the importance of prevention for SWDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attachment theory posits that parenting plays akey role in children's attachment and subsequent development. Given the normativity of racial discrimination on everyday life experiences of African American families, there is a need to integrate historical and socio-environmental processes in studies to understand how minoritized parents raise secure and stable children. Results from the current study revealed direct associations between mothers' reports of discrimination and heightened depression and anxiety. Maternal discriminatory experiences were indirectly associated with more negative parenting and compromised parent-child relationship quality, through mothers' psychological functioning. Elevated emotional and behavioral management problems among youth were directly associated with exposure to racial discrimination. Exposure to discrimination during middle childhood facilitated adapted or learned strategies to manage similar situations as youth transitioned into adolescence, with reduced patterns of depressive symptomology. No significant gender effects emerged. Implications for theoretical advancement and future research are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding Twitter by individuals and organizations to raise awareness and give voice to the disability community provides important insight into digital discourse around disability. This study examines #disability tweets shared during National Disability Employment Awareness Month in October 2018. Sourced and cleaned, English language tweets (n = 12,963) were analyzed through a mixed-methods approach. As the title of this paper, a tweet from our dataset, suggests, Twitter discourse reflects disability activism and culture as it exists globally. This work highlights important methodological considerations for differentiating the ways individuals and organizations utilize Twitter and highlights the importance of qualitative analysis in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racism continues to be a major source of stress for African Americans and can impair psychological functioning. Adolescents experiencing discrimination may engage in self-soothing, but risky behaviors, which leave them at risk for negative life trajectories. Black pride has been identified as a key factor in explaining the heterogeneity in responses to discrimination. Racial socialization, strategies parents use to promote Black pride and protect youth from discrimination, is an important focus of family-based prevention programs serving African American families. This study tests the efficacy of a culturally tailored preventive intervention for rural African American families to disrupt the negative consequences of discrimination on adolescent psychological functioning. Four waves of data from the Strong African American Families (SAAF) efficacy trial (Murry & Brody in Journal of Marital & Family Therapy 30(3):271-283, 2004) with 667 African American families in rural Georgia were used for this study. Structural equation modeling was used to test study hypotheses. Adolescent experiences with discrimination at age 15 predicted concurrent psychological functioning and multiple risk behaviors at age 16, including sexual risk behavior, substance use problems, academic failure, and juvenile justice involvement. Mediation analyses demonstrated that psychological functioning was a significant mediator of these relations. The SAAF program was associated with increases in racial socialization, which in turn fostered gains in adolescent Black pride. Black pride was indirectly associated with reduced risk behavior through adolescent psychological functioning, but Black pride did not moderate the effect of discrimination on psychological functioning. This study confirms that family-based prevention can support African American adolescent mental health in the context of discrimination. However, more emphasis on reducing exposure to discrimination is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose/Objective: This work provides comprehensive analyses targeting the factor structure and dimensionality of the Disability Identity Development Scale (DIDS). In Forber-Pratt et al., 2020, disability was defined broadly to include individuals with visible or hidden disabilities across many disability groups (i.e., physical, intellectual, learning, or chronic illness). Research Method/Design: Retained items from previous exploratory factor analysis were administered to a sample of adults with disabilities (n = 1,126) ranging in age from 18-78 years. Confirmatory factor analytics (CFA) including traditional CFA, and bifactor confirmatory analyses were used to examine the dimensionality and structure of the DIDS. Results: Traditional CFA provided lack of evidence in support of the oblique four-factor structure previously reported. Bifactor confirmatory analysis revealed items on the DIDS are consistent with unidimensional, and to a lesser degree multidimensional solutions (i.e., items lacked a level of content diversity to substantiate a complex, reliable multifactor structure). Discussion/Conclusion: Analytic results on the DIDS revealed reasonable psychometric properties as a measure of disability identity. Our results support using a sum or total score of disability identity. Results of this work are an important contribution to a growing body of literature supporting, and investigating, disability identity development. Furthermore, the DIDS measure with its resulting composite score of disability identity has the potential to inform clinicians in the field of rehabilitation psychology as well as informing future targeted interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose/Objective: The purpose of this study was to qualitatively explore how adolescents conceptualize disability identity and what factors may influence adolescent disability identity development. Research Method/Design: These data were collected through semistructured in-depth interviews with 24 middle and high school adolescents with disabilities. The participants had a wide range of disabilities, including physical disabilities, learning disabilities, ADHD, Autism, and others. Analyses started with Hamilton's Rapid Assessment Process followed by identifying structural and in vivo codes using a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis tool to allow for multiple coders and memo writing across the research team. Results: The results indicate that adolescents are undergoing a heterogeneous and complex process to develop their disability identity. Additionally, the salience of the participants' disability identity often varied depending on the environmental context. Furthermore, social connections to peers with and without disabilities played an important role in the development of many participants' disability identities. Conclusions/Implications: These findings suggest that adolescents with disabilities are engaging in a multifaceted meaning-making process to develop a sense of disability identity. Rehabilitation Psychologists and other practitioners can support disabled adolescents by helping them to discuss and develop a positive disability identity. Furthermore, practitioners can help disabled adolescents successfully develop their disability identity in a variety of different settings and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]