Associate Professor of Psychology at Howard University
About
Debra D. Roberts, PhD is the founding director of the Cultural Socialization Lab (CSL) housed in Howard University's Department of Psychology, where she is an associate professor and chair. She received her BSc in psychology/neuroscience from University of Toronto, MSc in community psychology from Florida A&M University, and PhD in developmental psychology from Temple University.
Dr. Roberts’ primary area of research involves examining various aspects of culture and ethnicity as they impact the relationship between psychosocially toxic environments, otherwise known as PTEs (poverty, violence, discrimination, trauma, etc.) and psychosocial well-being among children and adolescents. She has worked with diverse populations and has unique research experience with programs that target marginalized, vulnerable children and adolescents of color. As someone of Caribbean descent who was raised in Canada, she is particularly excited about the prospect of working with youth of African descent throughout the Diaspora. Her passion for research extends to the classroom, where both undergraduate and graduate courses motivate her to bring creative, innovative learning-focused instructional approaches to teaching.
Current Work:
Dr. Roberts is a developmental psychologist who places two socially-relevant constructs at the center of my research program: cultural socialization and development. Attempting to fill a gap in the literature that seeks to understand the normative development and resilience of youth who have been marginalized through the use of mainstream measures, she is in the process of revising a culturally based theoretical framework and two culturally sensitive measures that have been utilized mainly by her graduate students and some colleagues in their own empirical works. These include the: 1) Cultural Assets as Moderators (CAM) Model; 2) Cultural Socialization Scale (CSS); and 3) Parental Endorsement of Academic Success (PEAS) Scale.
Culminating from the work of preliminary studies conducted within her Cultural Socialization Lab (CSL), CAM was initially formulated as a tool for the myriad of undergraduate and graduate students under her mentorship to better formulate the original research questions they had around direct and indirect relationships among variables of interest. From this, they generated the term Psychosocially Toxic Environments (PTEs) to describe harmful psychological and social milieus such as discrimination, violence and poverty, which research links to suboptimal psychosocial outcomes, particularly for marginalized youth.
Consistent with the extant literature, Dr. Roberts' work supports the findings that discrimination and exposure to violence are inversely related to academic achievement, social skills, and self-esteem. However, the main contribution of CAM has been to shed light on the potential buffering role of cultural socialization and related variables in the relationship between PTEs and psychosocial outcomes such as academic achievement, social skill, self-esteem and internalizing/externalizing behaviors. Upcoming projects include the examination of the mediating role of psychophysiological variables such as neuroendocrine dysregulation in the toxic relationship between PTEs and developmental outcomes.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Culture, ethnicity, socialization, child/adolescent development, health outcomes
