Socioeconomic Status, Racial Discrimination, and the Well-being of Low-Income, Latinx Families

Dr. Teresa Nguyen will use her Visionary Grant Award from the American Psychological Foundation to test a proposed culturally-sensitive model of marriage and relationship development. The model asserts that a complete understanding of intimate relationships requires sensitivity to the cultural aspects of race and class, and that couples are ecologically rational actors, such that the “adaptiveness” of specific couple processes is dependent on specific social and cultural conditions. To test key assumptions of this model, she has outlined a study of 150 newlywed Latinx couples living with low incomes, in an effort to (a) develop an ecologically valid conceptualization and measure of marital quality for Latinx couples and (b) develop a culturally-informed understanding of predictors of marital quality and instability.