Mental Health and Educational Experiences Among Black Youth: A Latent Class Analysis

Disproportionately lower educational achievement, coupled with higher grade retention, suspensions, expulsions, and lower school bonding make educational success among Black adolescents a major public health concern. Mental health is a key developmental factor related to educational outcomes among adolescents; however, traditional models of mental health focus on absence of dysfunction as a way to conceptualize mental health. The dual-factor model of mental health incorporates indicators of both subjective wellbeing and psychopathology, supporting more recent research that both are needed to comprehensively assess mental health. This study applied the dual-factor model to measure mental health using the National Survey of American Life—Adolescent Supplement (NSAL-A), a representative cross-sectional survey. The sample included 1170 Black adolescents (52% female; mean age 15). Latent class analysis was conducted with positive indicators of subjective wellbeing (emotional, psychological, and social) as well as measures of psychopathology. Four mental health groups were identified, based on having high or low subjective wellbeing and high or low psychopathology. Accordingly, associations between mental health groups and educational outcomes were investigated. Significant associations were observed in school bonding, suspensions, and grade retention, with the positive mental health group (high subjective wellbeing, low psychopathology) experiencing more beneficial outcomes. The results support a strong association between school bonding and better mental health and have implications for a more comprehensive view of mental health in interventions targeting improved educational experiences and mental health among Black adolescents.     

Bringing the State Back In: Retrospect and ProspectThe 2007 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture

Taking off from theoretical and research agendas encouraged in the 1985 book Bringing the State Back In , this article traces developments in several areas of scholarship: studies of social revolutions and regime transformations; studies of the development of welfare states; and studies of social capital and democratic effectiveness. In all of these literatures, the author's own research and the research of many other scholars has been enriched by analyses of state-building and of the changing capacities of states to achieve particular goals, as well as by tracing 'policy feedbacks' over time. The original scholarly program called for a 'Weberian' approach to states as independent actors and for a 'Tocquevillian' emphasis on the ways that state structures and actions indirectly affect the ideas, goals and capacities of social groups in politics. The former approach remains relevant, and the latter has proved increasingly fruitful. Particularly vibrant areas of state-society research now focus on the struggles over social policies in mature welfare states and on the political, as well as sociocultural, roots of social capital and democratic citizen engagement.