Elena Maker Castro
Biographic Data
| ID | 312092 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elena Maker Castro |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elena Maker |
| FAMILY NAME | Castro |
| SIGNATURE | CASTRO E M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5795-3932 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Establishing a Reciprocal and Recursive Relationship Between Sociopolitical Development and Wellbeing for Early Emerging Adult College Students When “There Was a lot Happening in Both the World. . . a…
The existing, primarily quantitative literature suggests that for emerging adult college students (EACS), wellbeing has a complex relationship with sociopolitical development (i.e., the development of one’s awareness of and capacity to transform societal oppressions) that merits further unpacking. This study aimed to understand EACS’ reflections on their wellbeing and sociopolitical development pre-pandemic and during the pandemic, from 2019 to 2…
Adolescent Critical Action and Wellbeing in Rural Sociopolitical Contexts During the 2024 Presidential Election in the United States of America
Rural youths’ critical action (i.e., participation in social and political activities to create structural change) may be uniquely shaped by rural sociopolitical contexts, with cascading effects on wellbeing (i.e., physical, mental, and socioemotional health). We take a mixed‐methods approach to examine critical action and wellbeing among 23 rural adolescents from 10 primarily Northeast and Midwest USA states during the 2024 election season (M ag…
Critical reflection in the online context: How do immigrant‐origin youth make meaning of their sociopolitical experiences and identities
Social media facilitates sociopolitical development; however, xenophobic sociopolitical climates engender acculturative stressors for immigrant‐origin (IO) youth's online experiences. Through interviews with N = 90 IO youth ( M age = 16.41; 74.44% female‐identifying; 33.33% Asian, 26.67% Latinx, 25.56% Black, 8.89% multi‐racial, 3.33% white, 2.22% Middle Eastern), we qualitatively identified two meta‐themes regarding youth's critical reflection c…
A Sentiment Analysis Study on Gender and Racial Inequities in College Students’ Perceptions of the Covid-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated health inequities among emerging adult college students, and their experiences navigating intersectional systems of marginalization and institutional environments may have shaped their emotional wellbeing. We applied sentiment analysis of students’ reflections during the first 18 months of the pandemic to categorize and quantify the most common emotions, including by gender, race/ethnicity, and the type of instit…
White Youths’ Allyship on Instagram During the 2020 Black Lives Matter Movement: A Photovoice-Inspired Qualitative Study
During the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement resurgence in 2020, some white youth engaged in BLM-related allyship online. Using photovoice-inspired methodology and reflexive thematic analysis, we examined Instagram posts and reflections from 29 white youth with college experience (ages 18–22; 72% women; 7% transgender or gender diverse; 58% LGBQ+) from across the USA. First, we identified overarching content and motives for white youths’ posts. S…
Discriminatory experiences, critical consciousness development, and well-being among emerging adults in and beyond the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic
As part of the developmental stage of emerging adulthood, youth may cultivate critical consciousness (CC) to transform oppressive systems. CC development may be influenced by discriminatory experiences and may affect well-being. To better understand longitudinal CC development and its relationship to discrimination and well-being (i.e., perceived stress, anxiety, hopefulness), we studied a U.S. national longitudinal cohort of emerging adult colle…
Adolescents' Race Consciousness Strengthens Broader Awareness of Societal Inequality
This study examined bidirectional changes in adolescents' awareness of inequality and race consciousness between 2017 and 2018 in the USA and whether discriminatory experiences informed developmental pathways. The sample (N = 2645; Mage = 14.6, SD = 2.14; 56.5% female; > 0.01% transgender and gender diverse) was White (35.8%), Latinx (31.4%), multiple racial and ethnic groups (13.5%), Black (7.3%), and Asian (5.2%). Race consciousness predicted c…
Imagine Growing Up Thinking the US is the Best Opportunity”: Immigrant Origin Youth of Color Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement on Twitter
Immigrant origin youth are among the largest growing population in the United States of America (U.S.), and are important political agents for social change. This study examines how these youth engage in interracial solidarity, particularly in digital spaces. This study used reflexive thematic analysis to analyze the Twitter posts of 36 immigrant origin youth (ages 18–23; 62.5% women) from African/Afro-Latine, Latine, and Asian origins. We examin…
“Everyone has their story”: Intergroup dialogue's potential to cultivate connection through the sharing of migration narratives
Immigrant‐origin (I‐O) youth face increasing anti‐immigrant rhetoric in the United States, including in their schools. School‐based intergroup dialogue programming may help I‐O youth and their peers build a more inclusionary culture. We qualitatively examined how I‐O youth and their peers experienced a week‐long school‐wide intergroup dialogue program that aimed to foster connection among participants at a Northeastern high school. Participants’ …
Implementation of experts by experience in hospitals: No one-size-fits-all solution but an experience-based co-design (EBCD)
Experts by experience are defined by as long-term service users that have experience with a particular disease of disability. Through that experience, they have gained vast knowledge about it and about the health care services they use. Additionally, they possess the appropriate competencies (i.e. skills and attitude) to bring their knowledge into action. In that regard, we can identify experts by experience as valuable co-producers of care. The …
Who has to act? A qualitative exploration of emerging adults' critical consciousness during the Covid‐19 pandemic
The COVID‐19 pandemic and violence against people of Color during 2020 brought troubling racial inequities to the forefront of American discourse. In line with the Critical Consciousness (CC) and Social Justice Youth Development (SJYD) frameworks, emerging adults may have developed their capacity for critical reflection, motivation, and action against systemic inequities. We drew from interviews with 27 emerging adults (ages 18–23) across the US,…
Shifting Culture and Minds: Immigrant-Origin Youth Building Critical Consciousness on Social Media
This multi-method qualitative study explores how immigrant-origin (I-O) youth express civic engagement on social media, and how youths' immigrant identities shape their online civic engagement. We analyzed 2,203 Twitter posts collected over a 6-month period from 32 racially and ethnically diverse I-O youth (an average of 69 posts per participant). Interviews with 11 participants supplemented Twitter analysis. Using a critical consciousness framew…
Sociopolitical Influences in Early Emerging Adult College Students’ Pandemic-Related Civic Engagement
The COVID-19 pandemic has had wide-ranging impacts on college-going emerging adults and their communities, which may prompt them to engage civically. Using spring 2020 survey data from a national sample of college students aged 18–22 ( N = 707), we document the prevalence of pandemic-related civic engagement as well as differences in engagement by sociopolitical perspectives. The majority of participants (70.4%) reported engaging civically at lea…
Emotional Distancing”: Change and Strain in U.S. Young Adult College Students’ Relationships During Covid-19
We analyzed qualitative data from 707 USA college students aged 18-22 in late April 2020 regarding if and how their relationships had changed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most (69%) participants experienced relationship changes, most of whom (77%) described negative changes: less overall contact, feeling disconnected, and increased tension, some of which was due to conflict over pandemic-related public health precautions. Physical dista…
Critical action among Asian and Hispanic/Latinx youth: Identifying a multidimensional measure and exploring within‐group differences
Critical action-behaviors aimed at dismantling systems of oppression-must be examined within youths' racialized experiences and should incorporate cultural and sociohistorical factors. We considered an expansive list of items capturing youth behaviors to create a novel four-factor (service, community change, expression, and care) measure of critical action for Asian and Hispanic/Latinx youth. Multiple distinct profiles of critical action were ide…
Examining the Sociopolitical Development of Immigrant‐Origin Youth During a Season of Social Unrest
The sociopolitical context for immigrant-origin (I-O) youth's civic development in the U.S. has dramatically shifted in the years following the 2016 election (e.g., heightened xenophobia). I-O children comprise 26% of young people in the U.S. and include those born outside the U.S. (first generation) and those with at least one parent born outside the U.S. (second generation). Using a qualitative approach, this study examined how I-O youth (N = 6…
Associations between critical consciousness and well‐being in a national sample of college students during the Covid‐19 pandemic
Critical consciousness (CC) may promote well-being, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a national survey of 707 college students conducted in April 2020, we first validated the Short Critical Consciousness Scale (ShoCCS) among youth groups not often specifically examined in CC measurement (i.e., Asian, immigrant-origin, LGBQ+, and women youth). Next, we examined associations between ShoCCS subscales and validated measures of both anxie…
“Constant Stress Has Become the New Normal”: Stress and Anxiety Inequalities Among U.S. College Students in the Time of Covid-19
A Systematic Review of the Last Decade of Civic Education Research in the United States
Everyone collaborated and came together”: The civic promise (and pitfalls) of yPAR for immigrant-origin students in an era of deportation
Collaborative research can support I-O youths' civic development, though, the resistances encountered and engendered illuminate possible challenges to ensure its benefits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Fostering youth civic engagement through effective mentorship: Understanding the college student volunteer mentors who succeed
College student volunteers play a critical role in many school-based educational programs and can foster valuable near-peer relationships with adolescents, yet how to best select these volunteers has been understudied. We studied college student volunteer mentors for Generation Citizen, a non-profit that provides school-based action civics education programming, and their adolescent students. We identify three common characteristics possessed by …
Patients’ experiential knowledge and expertise in health care: A hybrid concept analysis
Patients’ experiential knowledge and expertise in health care: A hybrid concept analysis
Examining the Sociopolitical Development of Immigrant‐Origin Youth During a Season of Social Unrest
The sociopolitical context for immigrant-origin (I-O) youth's civic development in the U.S. has dramatically shifted in the years following the 2016 election (e.g., heightened xenophobia). I-O children comprise 26% of young people in the U.S. and include those born outside the U.S. (first generation) and those with at least one parent born outside the U.S. (second generation). Using a qualitative approach, this study examined how I-O youth (N = 6…
Shifting Culture and Minds: Immigrant-Origin Youth Building Critical Consciousness on Social Media
This multi-method qualitative study explores how immigrant-origin (I-O) youth express civic engagement on social media, and how youths' immigrant identities shape their online civic engagement. We analyzed 2,203 Twitter posts collected over a 6-month period from 32 racially and ethnically diverse I-O youth (an average of 69 posts per participant). Interviews with 11 participants supplemented Twitter analysis. Using a critical consciousness framew…
Who has to act? A qualitative exploration of emerging adults' critical consciousness during the Covid‐19 pandemic
The COVID‐19 pandemic and violence against people of Color during 2020 brought troubling racial inequities to the forefront of American discourse. In line with the Critical Consciousness (CC) and Social Justice Youth Development (SJYD) frameworks, emerging adults may have developed their capacity for critical reflection, motivation, and action against systemic inequities. We drew from interviews with 27 emerging adults (ages 18–23) across the US,…
Associations between critical consciousness and well‐being in a national sample of college students during the Covid‐19 pandemic
Critical consciousness (CC) may promote well-being, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a national survey of 707 college students conducted in April 2020, we first validated the Short Critical Consciousness Scale (ShoCCS) among youth groups not often specifically examined in CC measurement (i.e., Asian, immigrant-origin, LGBQ+, and women youth). Next, we examined associations between ShoCCS subscales and validated measures of both anxie…
Discriminatory experiences, critical consciousness development, and well-being among emerging adults in and beyond the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic
As part of the developmental stage of emerging adulthood, youth may cultivate critical consciousness (CC) to transform oppressive systems. CC development may be influenced by discriminatory experiences and may affect well-being. To better understand longitudinal CC development and its relationship to discrimination and well-being (i.e., perceived stress, anxiety, hopefulness), we studied a U.S. national longitudinal cohort of emerging adult colle…
Imagine Growing Up Thinking the US is the Best Opportunity”: Immigrant Origin Youth of Color Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement on Twitter
Immigrant origin youth are among the largest growing population in the United States of America (U.S.), and are important political agents for social change. This study examines how these youth engage in interracial solidarity, particularly in digital spaces. This study used reflexive thematic analysis to analyze the Twitter posts of 36 immigrant origin youth (ages 18–23; 62.5% women) from African/Afro-Latine, Latine, and Asian origins. We examin…
Critical action among Asian and Hispanic/Latinx youth: Identifying a multidimensional measure and exploring within‐group differences
Critical action-behaviors aimed at dismantling systems of oppression-must be examined within youths' racialized experiences and should incorporate cultural and sociohistorical factors. We considered an expansive list of items capturing youth behaviors to create a novel four-factor (service, community change, expression, and care) measure of critical action for Asian and Hispanic/Latinx youth. Multiple distinct profiles of critical action were ide…
Everyone collaborated and came together”: The civic promise (and pitfalls) of yPAR for immigrant-origin students in an era of deportation
Collaborative research can support I-O youths' civic development, though, the resistances encountered and engendered illuminate possible challenges to ensure its benefits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Patients’ experiential knowledge and expertise in health care: A hybrid concept analysis
“Constant Stress Has Become the New Normal”: Stress and Anxiety Inequalities Among U.S. College Students in the Time of Covid-19
A Systematic Review of the Last Decade of Civic Education Research in the United States
Everyone collaborated and came together”: The civic promise (and pitfalls) of yPAR for immigrant-origin students in an era of deportation
Collaborative research can support I-O youths' civic development, though, the resistances encountered and engendered illuminate possible challenges to ensure its benefits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Fostering youth civic engagement through effective mentorship: Understanding the college student volunteer mentors who succeed
College student volunteers play a critical role in many school-based educational programs and can foster valuable near-peer relationships with adolescents, yet how to best select these volunteers has been understudied. We studied college student volunteer mentors for Generation Citizen, a non-profit that provides school-based action civics education programming, and their adolescent students. We identify three common characteristics possessed by …
Sociopolitical Influences in Early Emerging Adult College Students’ Pandemic-Related Civic Engagement
The COVID-19 pandemic has had wide-ranging impacts on college-going emerging adults and their communities, which may prompt them to engage civically. Using spring 2020 survey data from a national sample of college students aged 18–22 ( N = 707), we document the prevalence of pandemic-related civic engagement as well as differences in engagement by sociopolitical perspectives. The majority of participants (70.4%) reported engaging civically at lea…
Emotional Distancing”: Change and Strain in U.S. Young Adult College Students’ Relationships During Covid-19
We analyzed qualitative data from 707 USA college students aged 18-22 in late April 2020 regarding if and how their relationships had changed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most (69%) participants experienced relationship changes, most of whom (77%) described negative changes: less overall contact, feeling disconnected, and increased tension, some of which was due to conflict over pandemic-related public health precautions. Physical dista…
Critical action among Asian and Hispanic/Latinx youth: Identifying a multidimensional measure and exploring within‐group differences
Critical action-behaviors aimed at dismantling systems of oppression-must be examined within youths' racialized experiences and should incorporate cultural and sociohistorical factors. We considered an expansive list of items capturing youth behaviors to create a novel four-factor (service, community change, expression, and care) measure of critical action for Asian and Hispanic/Latinx youth. Multiple distinct profiles of critical action were ide…
Examining the Sociopolitical Development of Immigrant‐Origin Youth During a Season of Social Unrest
The sociopolitical context for immigrant-origin (I-O) youth's civic development in the U.S. has dramatically shifted in the years following the 2016 election (e.g., heightened xenophobia). I-O children comprise 26% of young people in the U.S. and include those born outside the U.S. (first generation) and those with at least one parent born outside the U.S. (second generation). Using a qualitative approach, this study examined how I-O youth (N = 6…
Associations between critical consciousness and well‐being in a national sample of college students during the Covid‐19 pandemic
Critical consciousness (CC) may promote well-being, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a national survey of 707 college students conducted in April 2020, we first validated the Short Critical Consciousness Scale (ShoCCS) among youth groups not often specifically examined in CC measurement (i.e., Asian, immigrant-origin, LGBQ+, and women youth). Next, we examined associations between ShoCCS subscales and validated measures of both anxie…
“Everyone has their story”: Intergroup dialogue's potential to cultivate connection through the sharing of migration narratives
Immigrant‐origin (I‐O) youth face increasing anti‐immigrant rhetoric in the United States, including in their schools. School‐based intergroup dialogue programming may help I‐O youth and their peers build a more inclusionary culture. We qualitatively examined how I‐O youth and their peers experienced a week‐long school‐wide intergroup dialogue program that aimed to foster connection among participants at a Northeastern high school. Participants’ …
Implementation of experts by experience in hospitals: No one-size-fits-all solution but an experience-based co-design (EBCD)
Experts by experience are defined by as long-term service users that have experience with a particular disease of disability. Through that experience, they have gained vast knowledge about it and about the health care services they use. Additionally, they possess the appropriate competencies (i.e. skills and attitude) to bring their knowledge into action. In that regard, we can identify experts by experience as valuable co-producers of care. The …
Who has to act? A qualitative exploration of emerging adults' critical consciousness during the Covid‐19 pandemic
The COVID‐19 pandemic and violence against people of Color during 2020 brought troubling racial inequities to the forefront of American discourse. In line with the Critical Consciousness (CC) and Social Justice Youth Development (SJYD) frameworks, emerging adults may have developed their capacity for critical reflection, motivation, and action against systemic inequities. We drew from interviews with 27 emerging adults (ages 18–23) across the US,…
Shifting Culture and Minds: Immigrant-Origin Youth Building Critical Consciousness on Social Media
This multi-method qualitative study explores how immigrant-origin (I-O) youth express civic engagement on social media, and how youths' immigrant identities shape their online civic engagement. We analyzed 2,203 Twitter posts collected over a 6-month period from 32 racially and ethnically diverse I-O youth (an average of 69 posts per participant). Interviews with 11 participants supplemented Twitter analysis. Using a critical consciousness framew…
Imagine Growing Up Thinking the US is the Best Opportunity”: Immigrant Origin Youth of Color Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement on Twitter
Immigrant origin youth are among the largest growing population in the United States of America (U.S.), and are important political agents for social change. This study examines how these youth engage in interracial solidarity, particularly in digital spaces. This study used reflexive thematic analysis to analyze the Twitter posts of 36 immigrant origin youth (ages 18–23; 62.5% women) from African/Afro-Latine, Latine, and Asian origins. We examin…
White Youths’ Allyship on Instagram During the 2020 Black Lives Matter Movement: A Photovoice-Inspired Qualitative Study
During the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement resurgence in 2020, some white youth engaged in BLM-related allyship online. Using photovoice-inspired methodology and reflexive thematic analysis, we examined Instagram posts and reflections from 29 white youth with college experience (ages 18–22; 72% women; 7% transgender or gender diverse; 58% LGBQ+) from across the USA. First, we identified overarching content and motives for white youths’ posts. S…
Discriminatory experiences, critical consciousness development, and well-being among emerging adults in and beyond the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic
As part of the developmental stage of emerging adulthood, youth may cultivate critical consciousness (CC) to transform oppressive systems. CC development may be influenced by discriminatory experiences and may affect well-being. To better understand longitudinal CC development and its relationship to discrimination and well-being (i.e., perceived stress, anxiety, hopefulness), we studied a U.S. national longitudinal cohort of emerging adult colle…
Adolescents' Race Consciousness Strengthens Broader Awareness of Societal Inequality
This study examined bidirectional changes in adolescents' awareness of inequality and race consciousness between 2017 and 2018 in the USA and whether discriminatory experiences informed developmental pathways. The sample (N = 2645; Mage = 14.6, SD = 2.14; 56.5% female; > 0.01% transgender and gender diverse) was White (35.8%), Latinx (31.4%), multiple racial and ethnic groups (13.5%), Black (7.3%), and Asian (5.2%). Race consciousness predicted c…
Establishing a Reciprocal and Recursive Relationship Between Sociopolitical Development and Wellbeing for Early Emerging Adult College Students When “There Was a lot Happening in Both the World. . . a…
The existing, primarily quantitative literature suggests that for emerging adult college students (EACS), wellbeing has a complex relationship with sociopolitical development (i.e., the development of one’s awareness of and capacity to transform societal oppressions) that merits further unpacking. This study aimed to understand EACS’ reflections on their wellbeing and sociopolitical development pre-pandemic and during the pandemic, from 2019 to 2…
Adolescent Critical Action and Wellbeing in Rural Sociopolitical Contexts During the 2024 Presidential Election in the United States of America
Rural youths’ critical action (i.e., participation in social and political activities to create structural change) may be uniquely shaped by rural sociopolitical contexts, with cascading effects on wellbeing (i.e., physical, mental, and socioemotional health). We take a mixed‐methods approach to examine critical action and wellbeing among 23 rural adolescents from 10 primarily Northeast and Midwest USA states during the 2024 election season (M ag…
Critical reflection in the online context: How do immigrant‐origin youth make meaning of their sociopolitical experiences and identities
Social media facilitates sociopolitical development; however, xenophobic sociopolitical climates engender acculturative stressors for immigrant‐origin (IO) youth's online experiences. Through interviews with N = 90 IO youth ( M age = 16.41; 74.44% female‐identifying; 33.33% Asian, 26.67% Latinx, 25.56% Black, 8.89% multi‐racial, 3.33% white, 2.22% Middle Eastern), we qualitatively identified two meta‐themes regarding youth's critical reflection c…
A Sentiment Analysis Study on Gender and Racial Inequities in College Students’ Perceptions of the Covid-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated health inequities among emerging adult college students, and their experiences navigating intersectional systems of marginalization and institutional environments may have shaped their emotional wellbeing. We applied sentiment analysis of students’ reflections during the first 18 months of the pandemic to categorize and quantify the most common emotions, including by gender, race/ethnicity, and the type of instit…
Psychology (17 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Youth Development and Social Support (12 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Developmental psychology (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Medicine (6 works) · Pandemic (6 works) · Politics (6 works)