{"doi":"10.17169/refubium-50010","title":"Biosocial Pathways of Racialized Disparities in Children’s and Adolescents’ Mental Health","abstract":"Racism is a structural force that organizes daily life, shapes access to resources and opportunity, and produces cumulative impacts on health across the life course. Health disparities between racially privileged and racially marginalized groups are not due to innate genetic differences; they emerge through processes that are both chronic and systematic, rooted in long-standing structures of marginalization. Despite growing recognition of racism’s health impacts, research often treats race as a static covariate and fails to interrogate racism as a dynamic, cumulative, and upstream driver of unequal health outcomes—particularly in childhood and adolescence. Few studies examine racism as a structural force that shapes mental health trajectories over time. Even fewer integrate children’s lived experiences of racialization with epigenetic data. These gaps are especially stark in Germany, where historical legacies limit the direct study of racism’s impact on development and health. This cumulative dissertation addresses these gaps by advancing and applying a race-critical biosocial framework. While biosocial approaches are well suited to explore how social conditions shape health, they have often fallen short in addressing the structural dimensions of racism. A race-critical biosocial framework offers tools to trace how racism operates and becomes embodied, shaping children’s and adolescents’ mental health. Three peer-reviewed papers structure and guide this inquiry. Paper 1 advances a race-critical biosocial framework that integrates critical race theory, developmental science, and sociogenomics, with particular attention to Germany’s scientific and sociopolitical context. Paper 2 applies this framework in the German context through communities-based qualitative research with 29 Black families. Focus group findings highlight racism as a chronic, multisite stressor that shapes family health, children’s mental health, identity development, and coping strategies. Paper 3 extends the race-critical biosocial framework to U.S. longitudinal data (N = 4,898; DNA methylation data N = 2,039), operationalizing racism through self-identified race/ethnicity, neighborhood segregation, and skin tone. Findings show that racially marginalized children exhibit higher baseline levels of internalizing and externalizing behaviors in childhood, as well as accelerated epigenetic biological aging during adolescence, with mental health and biological aging progressing in parallel. Together, the three papers provide conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative evidence that racism is a biosocial health risk. It structures children’s environments from birth, becomes embodied through stress-related mechanisms, and contributes to early mental health disparities. The dissertation highlights the urgent need for child-centered, intersectional, and longitudinal measures of racialization in both Germany and the U.S., and calls for co-designed, communities-led biosocial research. By showing how racism “gets under the skin,” it advances a race-critical biosocial agenda for public health and developmental science.","journal":"Refubium (Universitätsbibliothek der Freien Universität Berlin)","year":2025,"id":587673,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9388,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":988383,"name":"M. Aikins","orcid":"0009-0007-9831-6255","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:59:39.958043Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}