Margaret Beale Spencer

Margaret Beale Spencer is an American psychologist whose work centers on the effects of ethnicity, gender, and race on youth and adolescent development. She currently serves as the Charles L. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, and the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Dr. Spencer's career spans more than 30 years and consists of over 115 published articles and chapters, stemming from work funded by over two-dozen foundations and federal agencies.

Education and career Margaret Beale Spencer completed a five-year Bachelor of Science (BS) in pharmacy at Temple University's School of Pharmacy, and completed post-degree clinical requirements for certification and pharmacy licensure. She received her master's degree from the University of Kansas, where she worked with developmental psychologist Frances Degen Horowitz. She went on to receive her PhD in Child and Developmental Psychology from the University of Chicago in 1976.

She taught in both the psychology and education departments at Emory University before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directed the W. E. B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute as well as the Center for Health Achievement Neighborhood Growth and Ethnic Studies (CHANGES). Board Member and Trustee of the Foundation for Child Development.

Research

Master's thesis

Spencer master's thesis, titled "Effects of Systematic Social and Token Reinforcement on the Modification of Racial and Color Concept Attitudes in Black and in White Preschool Children," was inspired by the doll studies of Kenneth and Mamie Clark and investigated whether children's racial beliefs and preferences could be modified by incentives.

Spencer concluded that the children had learned implicit biases during their childhood, but that the initial preference towards White stimulus could be reversed with incentives, suggesting that initial bias was more related to learned attitudes than an internalized self-hatred as suggested by the Clarks. PVEST addresses the social, historical, and cultural context in which youths develop, and as well as the perceptions and self-appraisals that individuals use to form their identity.

Net Vulnerability level: history of prior experiences and coping outcomes. Net stress engagement: actual experience that challenges individual's well-being. Reactive coping methods: employed to resolve dissonance-producing situations. Emergent identities: coping strategies are repeated, become stable, and combine with self-appraisal to form identity. Life-stage, specific coping outcomes: identity affects future behavior and outcomes (self-esteem, achievement, health, etc.).

The APA Task Force on Resilience and Strength in Black Children and Adolescents describes Spencer's PVEST theory as "a seminal and important contribution to the study of resilience among African American children and youth" (p. 34) for being one of the only theories taking into account the "ecological contextual circumstances unique to youths of color in the United States" (p. 23)

2006: Awarded the Fletcher Fellowship, recognizing work that furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

2008: Elected as Member of National Academy of Education.

2011: Society for Research in Child Development's award for "Distinguished Contributions to Cultural and Contextual Factors in Child Development."

2015: Northwestern University's Honorary Doctorate "Doctor of Humane Letters."

2018: American Psychological Association's APA Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology.

2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow.

2019: American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow.

Selected works 2001: 1999: 1994: 1990: 1990: 1983: