School-based contributors to adolescents' ethnic-racial identity public regard

Adolescents' ethnic-racial identity, including their beliefs about their ethnic-racial group, are shaped by their social contexts. One important ethnic-racial identity belief is public regard, which reflects adolescents' perceptions of their ethnic-racial group's social standing; however, limited research explores how school-based forces inform ethnoracially minoritized adolescents' public regard. Accordingly, the present study examined the interrelations among school discrimination, school belonging, and public regard over the course of a school year among Black, Asian American, and Latine adolescents (n = 2,060; M_age = 15.91, 46% boys, 54% girls or another gender). Findings suggested that across the three ethnic-racial groups, higher beginning-of-year school belonging was associated with higher public regard over the course of the school year, whereas higher beginning-of-year school discrimination was associated with lower public regard over the course of the school year. Drawing on an ecological systems framing, we also explored whether these relations were bidirectional, and we found that higher beginning-of-year public regard was associated with higher school belonging over the course of the school year, but beginning-of-year public regard was not associated with later reports of school discrimination. We did not find differences in the strength or significance of any of these relations across ethnic-racial groups. Our findings highlight the important role of school contextual factors in the evolving ethnic-racial identity beliefs of adolescents from ethnoracially minoritized backgrounds. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).