Media literacy and for the net generation

The paper explores the opportunities and challenges of combining media literacy and social-emotional literacy to promote mental health and wellbeing in school curricula. It describes the implementation of an experimental module within the program Crescere insieme What's Up (Growing up together What's Up). This upstream prevention and health promotion program, from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region (north-eastern Italy) is designed to harness the protective effects of developing and strengthening life skills to move beyond risk factors to prevent youth suicide, fostering connections and support between school and mental health institutions, peers and adults. The program activities involved role plays and reflection activities, collaborating in project group work, consulting and producing media (such as articles, Youtube videos and Powerpoint presentations) for peer-to-peer education. It adopted an experiential approach enabling active engagement of high school students, their parents and teachers, and 'learning by doing' with agency and responsibility. Qualitative feedback from students and teachers, study limitations and further implications are discussed.peer-reviewe

Ethnic identification and outgroup attitudes in minority and majority groups

According to Social Identity Theory, ingroup identification leads to negative outgroup attitudes. According to multi-cultural theory, instead, a stronger ethnic identity should favor acceptance of other groups. Here we studied the relation between ethnic identification (in minority vs majority groups) and outgroups attitudes. In particular, we focused on the emotional reactions towards the opening of a national border due to the enlargement of Slovenia in the European Union. By examining questionnaires from 168 Slovene and 134 Italian majority group students, and 110 Slovene minority students aged 16-19, we found that participants of the majority groups with high ingroup identification reported more negative responses towards the outgroups than participants with lower ethnic identification. For the minority group, conversely, a higher level of identification was associated to more positive attitudes towards the outgroups

Media Literacy and Social Emotional Learning for the Net Generation

The paper explores the opportunities and challenges of combining media literacy and social-emotional literacy to promote mental health and wellbeing in school curricula. It describes the implementation of an experimental module within the program Crescere insieme What's Up (Growing up together What's Up). This upstream prevention and health promotion program, from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region (north-eastern Italy) is designed to harness the protective effects of developing and strengthening life skills to move beyond risk factors to prevent youth suicide, fostering connections and support between school and mental health institutions, peers and adults. The program activities involved role plays and reflection activities, collaborating in project group work, consulting and producing media (such as articles, Youtube videos and Powerpoint presentations) for peer-to-peer education. It adopted an experiential approach enabling active engagement of high school students, their parents and teachers, and 'learning by doing' with agency and responsibility. Qualitative feedback from students and teachers, study limitations and further implications are discussed

Patterns of Ingroup Identification and Outgroup Attitudes on the Italo-Slovene Borderland

2008/2009The dissertation explored the themes of multiple identities and out-group attitudes among minority (autochthonous and immigrant) and majority groups on the Italo-Slovene borderland, considered a “natural laboratory” to study the effects of the entrance of Slovenia in European Union and in the Schengen area on ethnic and national identification, territorial attachments, intergroup dynamics and social integration processes. These issues were approached combining quantitative (415 questionnaires) and qualitative (56 interviews) measures. The research was grounded in the conceptual models developed in the field of social psychology, using as main theoretical frameworks the Social Identity Theory and the Self-Categorization Theory (Tajfel, 1982; Horsey & Hogg, 2000) and Social Identity Complexity Theory (Roccas & Brewer, 2002). It aimed to determine whether complex (vs. simple) ingroup identification in minority and majority members is related to outgroup orientation. Individuals with high social identity complexity were expected to be more inclusive and to show more outgroup acceptance (Brewer & Pierce, 2005). Furthermore, the study tested a new measure created to measure social identity complexity by assessing inclusion of others in the self. We argued that people who are exposed to more groups coexisting in a multicultural and plurilingual geographic region or who have been socialized in two cultures at the same time are more likely to exhibit a more complex social identity structure (Benet-Martínez, Leu, Lee, & Morris, 2002; Berry, 2003; Miller, Brewer & Arbuckle, 2009). This was confirmed with our sample: mainly minority members, but also some majority respondents expressed a high level of social identity complexity. Slovene minority members frequently saw themselves as something else and more than merely “Slovenian” or “Italian”, for instance, used more than one ethno-cultural label and self-categorization with different degrees of overlapping components, showing an effective integration expressed in combined ethnic and national identification (Berry, 2006) or showed hybrid identities. Following Bhabha's perspective (1996), it was suggested that hybrid identifications and other complex identity structures may have the potential to mediate similarities and differences between groups, transcending the binary oppositional positioning of “us” and “them”, fostering inclusion and collaboration between groups. When ethnic identity and social comparison were primed, Slovene minority members of our sample expressed higher degrees of ethnic identification than majority members. Since they tended to adopt complex identification self-descriptions, it appeared clear that these forms of self-definition are strategies that help reducing uncertainty and maintaining the optimal level of distinctivity (Leonardelli & Brewer, 2001). They also expressed higher attachments to local territorial units rather than national ones. The results further revealed aspects of situational ethnicity among Slovene minority members. All the groups considered language and culture as the most important national identity markers and a requirement for acculturation. Most of the participants stated they did not perceive any significant effect of the socio-political changes of the last decades on their ethnic and national sense of self or on intergroup attitudes. Among the positive aspects mentioned there were pride and confidence related to one's sense of belonging, strenghtened awareness of European citizenship, increased attachment to Slovenia, more opportunities for inergroup contact and cooperation fostering mutual knowledge. The data suggested that perceived similarity with target group and complex identity structure are associated with lower social distance, higher percentage of intergroup contacts and more positive outgroup orientation. We concluded with some reflections on limitations of the study and potentials of complex multiple social identifications in intergroup bias reduction strategies.XXI Cicl

Is There a Paradox of Adaptation in Immigrant Children and Youth across Europe? : A Literature Review

This review examines how well children of immigrants in Europe are doing in terms of educational, psychological, and behavioral outcomes. Based on theory and research in developmental, social and acculturation psychology fields, we explore the immigrant paradox (e.g., first-generation immigrant children show better adaptation in comparison to their native and second-generation counterparts) and migration morbidity (e.g., immigrants display less favorable outcomes than natives) in 102 studies conducted in 14 European countries. We conclude that theoretical assumptions of developmental (e.g., promoting context in families, schools, neighborhoods), social (e.g., intercultural behaviors and attitudes, lack of discrimination) and acculturation psychology (e.g., cultural maintenance and adoption, biculturalism) are powerful constituents for optimal adaptation of immigrant children and youth. Taken together, these constituents should guide policies and programs targeting optimal outcomes for children of immigrants. A discussion within empirically based policy practices to promote positive outcomes of young immigrant populations in Europe is offered

The Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS)

Abstract. The Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS; Crocetti, Rubini, & Meeus, 2008) is a recently developed measure of identity that has been shown to be a reliable tool for assessing identity processes in adolescents. This study examines psychometric properties of the U-MICS in a large adolescent sample from seven European countries focused on the interplay of commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment. Participants were 1,007 adolescents from Bulgaria (n = 146), the Czech Republic (n = 142), Italy (n = 144), Kosovo (n = 150), Romania (n = 142), Slovenia (n = 156), and the Netherlands (n = 127). We tested the U-MICS measurement invariance, reliability estimates in each language version, and compared latent identity means across groups. Results showed that the U-MICS has good internal consistency as well as configural, metric, and partial scalar invariance across groups in the sampled countrie