Tiyobista Maereg

Tiyobista Maereg, a graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program, received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an undergraduate, she worked as a research assistant with Drs. Jennifer Coffman and Peter Orenstein on a study looking at the impact of parent/teacher instructional style on children’s memory. As a McNair Scholar, Tiyobista conducted an independent project under Dr. Shauna Cooper’s advisership on the impact of acculturative conflict, or parent-youth conflict related to differences in cultural values, adolescent’s mental health, and education. Focusing on Black immigrant families, who are often overlooked in this research, Tiyobista found that for youth who report more discrimination experiences, higher acculturative conflict linked with greater depressive symptoms and perceptions of higher parental academic expectations in adolescents who immigrated to the United States as children.

Working with Dr. Dawn Witherspoon, Tiyobista’s research focuses on the development of ethnic-racial identity for Black youth and the impact of context on this developmental process. Her master’s thesis examined how neighborhood ethnic-racial composition impacts the relationship between ethnic-racial identity development and academic outcomes for Black and Latinx adolescents. She also looked at how gender and ethnicity/race impacts that potential relationship. Tiyobista found that in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of Latinx residents, higher centrality, or viewing one’s race-ethnicity as important to one’s self-concept, was overall linked with higher academic expectations, although for boys, specifically, higher centrality was linked with lower academic expectations. Public regard, or how positively one perceives other people to view their ethnic-racial group, had a slightly positive relationship with academic expectations as well, but only in less disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Since 2020 Tiyobista has taken an active role in the Parents And Children Together (PACT) research initiative as a graduate administrative assistant. Through this work, she has developed an understanding of and experience with community-engaged research as well as the importance of valuing and centering on the needs of communities. Following graduation, she hopes to integrate translational research with policy and continue to conduct community-engaged research related to the lives and well-being of Black and immigrant youth.