Future Prospects for Studying Ethnic and Racial Minority Youths and Families in Diverse Rural and Nonrural Contexts

This chapter evaluates the scholarship on rural minority youth exemplified in this volume and identifies ways to move the field forward. We argue that to advance the next generation of meaningful scholarship on rural minority youths and families, scholars will need to integrate sophisticated theorizing about ethno-cultural diversity with increasingly sophisticated theorizing about contextual diversity. To facilitate such an integration, we first analyze the volume within a bioecological theoretical perspective, concluding that the theory offers a framework that could be used to facilitate higher levels of synthesis and meaning-making from diverse scholarship on rural minority youths and families. Second, we provide an overview of culturally informed theorizing, which can support sophisticated research designs and hypothesis testing that reflects within- and between-group ethno-cultural diversity. Finally, we present a new conceptual tool, contextually informed theorizing, which we believe can contribute to a more sophisticated view of contexts generally and rural contexts specifically.