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Margaret Beale Spencer

Margaret Beale Spencer, Ph.D.

Dr. Spencer specializes in adolescent psychology, with a research emphasis on resiliency, identity, and competence formation. Her work has focused on the cognitive and socio-emotional aspects of development, particularly with young people of color and from low-resource family backgrounds.

Positions

  • Graduate School of Education Board of Overseers Professor of Education and Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
  • Director, Center for Health, Achievement, Neighborhood, Growth and Ethnic Studies , University of Pennsylvania
  • Director, W.E.B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania

 

Education

  • Ph.D., 1976, University of Chicago, Child and Developmental Psychology

 

Relevant Publications

  • Brookins, G. K., & Spencer, M. B. (Eds.). (in press). Handbook of race, ethnicity and human development: A multidisciplinary approach. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.
  • Spencer, M. B., & Harpalani, V. (in press). What does "acting White" actually mean?: Racial identity, adolescent development, and academic achievement among African American youth. In J. U. Ogbu (Ed.), Minority status, collective identity and schooling. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Spencer, M. B. (2006). Phenomenology and ecological systems theory: Development of diverse groups. In W. Damon & R. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 1. Theoretical Models of Human Development (6th ed., pp. 829-893). New York: Wiley.
  • Spencer, M. B., Harpalani, V., Cassidy, E., Jacobs, C., Donde, S., Goss, T., et al. (2nd ed., 2006). Understanding vulnerability and resilience from a normative developmental perspective: Implications for racially and ethnically diverse youth. In D. Cicchetti & D. Cohen (Eds.), Developmental Psychopathology: Vol. 1. Theory and method (2nd ed., pp. 627-672). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
  • Spencer, M. B., Noll, E., & Cassidy, E., (2005). Monetary incentives in support of academic achievement: Results of a randomized field trial involving high-achieving, low-resource, ethnically diverse urban adolescents. Evaluation Reviews, 29, 199-222.

 

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