Social Work with Multicultural Youth

Book excerpt: Explore the cultural, familial, and community resilience and protective factors that are available to different youth populations in the U.S.! The face of American youth is changing. In 2000, ethnic minority youth constituted one third of the adolescent population; by mid-century, the combined ethnic minority youth population will exceed the white adolescent population. This vital book illustrates the diversity within the adolescent population, examines the factors that serve as barriers and as facilitators to development, and identifies strengths and protective factors contributing to resilience as well as needs and risk factors. Social Work with Multicultural Youth presents accurate conceptual frameworks for understanding the experiences of ethnic youth to help you create culturally relevant interventions to promote their well-being. Here is a sample of what you'll find in this important and informative book: a comprehensive epidemiological profile of adolescent populationswith current data on issues that contribute to adolescents' health and well-being cultural strengths models and resilience models that meet the developmental needs of Latino and African-American youth an overview of the academic disparities between Latina adolescents and their cohorts in other ethnic groups an important chapter that employs conflict theory to place the disadvantaged status and position of African-American youth in its proper context specific recommendations for modifying the process of preparing Latino and African-American youth in foster care for emancipation information on factors that differentially impact academic achievement between African-American youth and their European-American cohorts real-world data about the who and where of adolescent fightingidentified by race/ethnicity, gender, and age new information about substance use in Asian/Pacific Islander populations in America, with important implications for substance abuse interventions resilience and protective factors that emerge from a qualitative study of seventh grade Latina adolescents a look at the differences in sexual behavior and attitudes between Latina adolescents born in the United States and those born outside the U.S. an evaluation of a unique, five-hour intensive intervention aimed at changing the knowledge and attitudes of Latino youth in regard to pregnancy and STDs