Building Better Models of Racial/Ethnic Identity Development: A Commentary on Satterthwaite-Freiman and Umaña-Taylor

Racial/ethnic identity is a central construct in developmental psychology that has been studied extensively over the past several decades. Despite this accumulation of knowledge, there are many lingering questions about the nature and relevance of racial/ethnic identity for youth development. In this commentary, we use the Satterthwaite-Freiman and Umaña-Taylor (2024) target article on White racial/ethnic identity to argue that a meta-scientific reason for the lack of major progress in understanding racial/ethnic identity is deficiencies in core theoretical, conceptual, and methodological considerations. We discuss each of these issues, in turn, and provide some suggestions for future theoretical and empirical work.