Using a Master Narrative Framework to Examine Conversations About Race and Ethnicity

Systemic racism, reinforced by color-evasive ideology, shapes the ways that emerging adults process and discuss race/ethnicity. In this preregistered and mixed methods study, we used a master narrative framework to examine narratives about race/ethnicity among U.S. emerging adult friend-pairs.

Participants consisted of 107 friend-pairs (N = 214 total) who provided individually written racial/ethnic narratives and engaged in an unstructured conversation with each other in which race/ethnicity was brought up.

Using quantitative methods, we found that meaning making of racial/ethnic experiences was higher in written relative to spoken narrative contexts. Additionally, using qualitative methods, we identified specific conversation dynamics capturing how young people discussed race/ethnicity, including subthemes of mitigation and encouragement, finding that encouragement dynamics were related to higher meaning making.

Our discussion centers on the value of integrating qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how the meaning of race/ethnicity is silenced or encouraged, and to reveal how master narratives perpetuating racial inequality may be disrupted.