Dr. Williams' psychology department web page

Dr. Williams’ work examines how risk factors (e.g., discrimination) and resilience factors (e.g., cultural socialization) inform ethnic-racial minority youths’ positive psychological, academic and health outcomes. The majority of her work focuses on Latino and African American youth, and involves two main areas: (a) assessing what young children understand and feel about their culture (i.e., ethnic-racial identification), and how this plays a role in development, and (b) examining the interplay between individual and contextual factors as they inform adolescents’ ethnic-racial identity and adjustment. Dr. Williams’ last study examined five-year-old Mexican-origin children’s ethnic-racial identification, and the factors that informed this process. Currently, she is adapting these assessments to be used in multiple studies with African American children five to eight years of age that will examine how ethnic-racial identification informs outcomes during this developmental period. Additionally, as a member of the Culture, Race and Health Transdisciplinary Core at the Institute for Inclusion, Inquiry and Innovation (iCubed) at VCU, Dr. Williams is working as part of a transdisciplinary team to design studies and interventions aimed at examining and addressing health disparities.