About

Nancy E. Hill is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on parenting and adolescent development. She has co-authored a book titled 'The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood' (Harvard University Press, 2021), which provides evidence for the historical precedence and rationale for extending the time to adulthood. Her broader research areas include examining how race, socioeconomic status, and community context interact to impact youths’ opportunities for upward mobility, particularly through secondary school and postsecondary transitions. Additionally, she studies the relational supports and mechanisms—such as familial and school-based supportive relationships—that influence adolescents’ emerging sense of purpose and views of the economy, which in turn affect their engagement in school, academic success, and development of goals and aspirations. Hill is recognized for her work in identifying developmentally sensitive strategies to maintain parental involvement in education during adolescence. Her current projects include longitudinal studies on diverse youth populations focusing on purpose, economic views, and post-secondary planning, as well as collaborations with urban school districts on family experiences with school choice and equitable access to educational opportunities.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Clinical psychology

Selected publications

• How Expectancies of Future Instability Evolve From Adolescence to Adulthood

  Open MIND · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Presidential Address: Parenting in Context, A Journey in Interdisciplinary and Multisector Research

  Child Development · 2025-07-26

  review1st authorCorresponding

  Increasing global diversity of children and families calls for developmental sciences to incorporate the dynamic interactions of race, ethnicity, culture, and other contextual experiences. However, navigating ecological and cultural theories defies our disciplinary-based training. Promoting interdisciplinary multisector research is necessary. With parenting as a lens, I described my journey toward increasingly interdisciplinary and multisector research. Interactions among ethnicity, community, and socioeconomic status varied by developmental stage and context, resulting in revisiting conceptualizations of parenting. Further, through research-practice partnerships, cultivating a sense of purpose, apart from educational and career goals, emerged as significant for maintaining academic engagement and navigating an unstable and insecure job market. As president of SRCD (2021-2023), I emphasized and catalyzed transdisciplinary, multisector research to support children and families.

  PublisherDOI

• Parental Involvement in Education: A Multidimensional Assessment for Adolescence

  2025-05-16 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Parental involvement in education during adolescence takes on different conceptualizations and strategies, compared to younger ages, to match youths’ developmental needs (i.e., Academic Socialization). Academic Socialization entails understanding the value of education, fostering educational and occupational plans, linking schoolwork to interests and goals, and discussing learning strategies, generating an understanding between parents and youth about the larger purpose of schoolwork. Although the concept of Academic Socialization is related to a range of academic, mental health, and postsecondary outcomes, its measurement across studies has varied widely in scope and psychometric rigor. Based on grounded analyses of focus groups with ethnically diverse adolescents, their parents and teachers, along with a panel of expert raters, we conducted a quantitative development and initial validation study (N =386 parents, 31.9% African American; 31.1% Euro-American; & 31.3% Latinx) to test the psychometric properties of a new assessment of parental involvement in education for adolescence. Confirmatory factor analyses were used to test and then replicate the psychometric properties of the assessment. The resultant 34-item, 6-dimension assessment showed strong reliability, along with configural, metric, and scalar invariance across gender and configural and metric invariance across ethnicity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mapping the Journey: Exploring Youth Purpose Using a Visual Qualitative Method

  Youth · 2025-09-12

  articleOpen access

  Youth purpose is a critical developmental asset linked to well-being, academic engagement, and vocational success. However, traditional assessments often fail to capture its complexity. This study introduces an innovative qualitative approach that combines semi-structured interviews with visual mapping to help adolescent participants articulate their journey toward purpose development. Thirty-eight diverse high school students participated in creating visual maps to illustrate their personal paths toward finding purpose. Results revealed three salient themes: (1) chronology, with the road map serving as a way to depict purpose development across time, (2) the common shapes of purpose paths, revealing insights into the developmental experience of purpose, and (3) complementary enhancements, with the visual maps enriching the interviews. This approach offers a rich understanding of how meaningful relationships and formative experiences shape adolescents’ purpose development and highlights the potential of visual methods to capture these complex processes. We discuss practical applications for educational and counseling interventions aimed at cultivating youth purpose.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adolescent self‐efficacy and orientation about the future: Longitudinal associations with family/school support and sense of purpose

  Journal of Research on Adolescence · 2025-08-12 · 1 citations

  article

  Abstract Future‐oriented self‐efficacy and behaviors are essential assets as youth move from the structure of school to more independent pursuits. Given that adolescence is a time for internalizing goals, it is possible that future‐oriented efficacy and behaviors grow out of an emerging sense of purpose and are scaffolded by parents, teachers, and school counselors. This study tested the longitudinal relations between parental, teacher, and school counselor support and future‐oriented outcomes, with the mediating role of sense of purpose, using a racially and ethnically diverse sample of high school students followed across three years ( n = 645; 51% female; ). Early support from parents and satisfaction with school counselors, but not positive relationships with teachers, were significantly associated with adolescents' sense of purpose one year later, which then predicted future‐oriented self‐efficacy and behaviors in the last years of high school. Adolescents' sense of purpose at Time 2 mediated the pathway from the support of parents and school counselors at Time 1 to the outcomes at Time 3. While these associations did not vary by gender or students' intended postsecondary pathways—whether work or college—there were significant mean differences in each subgroup's perception of adult support. Findings suggest the need for parents and counselors to prioritize fostering a sense of purpose and tailoring supportive strategies to meet the needs of students based on their gender and aspirations.

  PublisherDOI

• Unpacking extended adolescence: Ecological contexts, relationships, and pathways to adulthood from a developmental health perspective.

  American Psychological Association eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sources, Conceptualizations, and Mechanisms of Racism/Oppression for Academic and Mental Health Outcomes

  AERA Open · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Interpersonal and systemic racism and discrimination persist in our educational system—from primary and secondary institutions through college, despite the forward strides of desegregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement. This special topic collection identifies and applies empirically and theoretically grounded conceptualizations of racism to improve our understanding of the experience of racism, interventions to mitigate it, and protective factors. The papers in this collection reflect two themes: 1) racial and religious identities in classrooms, schools, and universities, focusing on how educators mitigate and perpetuate systemic racism, including how White teachers understand the impact of race, how inclusive and antiracism curricula are received and rejected by future educators and clinicians, and the impact of exclusionary social networks in the hiring of teachers of color and 2) school belonging and climate, including documenting that students of color feel less safe, are disproportionately exposed to harsh discipline, question their belonging, and question commitments to diversity. The negative sequelae are concurrent and last into adulthood. In addition, there are several advances in theory and measurement, including assessing gendered and racial biases in teachers’ attributions about students’ abilities, frameworks for mitigating colonial and racialized trauma, and domains of antiracist activism to bring racial justice and equity to schools.

  PublisherDOI

• AFRICAN AMERICAN FAMILY LIFE: REDISCOVERING OUR FOUNDATIONAL WORKS

  Research in Human Development · 2023-10-02 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Race, ethnicity, and culture are central to human development and family life. However, early research pathologized these influences on African Americans. Pioneering scholars studying African American families challenged pathology-focused perspectives, laying the foundation for the strengths-focused culturally-anchored research that is now seen in the field. This article revisits this pioneering scholarship, rarely published in peer-reviewed journals, reintegrating them into the discourse on families so that their significance can be understood and recognized. Pioneering scholars offered nuanced theoretical frameworks, identified contextual and within-group variations, developed innovative methods to capture complexities and variation in African Americans’ functioning, and presciently recognized researchers’ positionality impacting research.

  PublisherDOI

• Creating a Sense of Belonging in the Context of Racial Discrimination and Racial Trauma

  Adversity and Resilience Science · 2022-07-02 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Parental involvement in education: Toward a more inclusive understanding of parents’ role construction

  Educational Psychologist · 2022-10-02 · 38 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How parents conceive of their role in their children’s education and how researchers and practitioners conceptualize parental involvement are significant for understanding parental involvement in education and its impact on developmental outcomes. Parental involvement in education encompasses families’ engagement at school, with teachers, at home, and with their children. Whereas schools are focused on what parents do in relation to schoolwork, parents experience their involvement as integrated into the rest of their parenting ideologies. This special issue considers a full breadth of parental involvement in education from homeschooling to involvement at school. Further, these articles focus on parents’ understanding of their role through the lens of their ethnic, racial, and cultural background and how their role evolves across developmental stages—from elementary school to college. Finally, whereas most school-based conceptualizations of parental involvement in education are focused on academic outcomes, the field is challenged to consider a broader range of outcomes and emphasize nonlinear associations between parental involvement in education and developmental outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John Perella

  18 shared

• Belle Liang

  Boston College

  16 shared

• Jonathan Sepulveda

  Felician College

  11 shared

• Brenna Lincoln

  Boston College

  11 shared

• Madeline Reed

  Wingate University

  9 shared

• Mariah M. Contreras

  Tufts University

  7 shared

• Maggi Price

  Boston College

  7 shared

• Daniel T. O’Brien

  Universidad del Noreste

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D. Developmental Psychology, Psychology

  Michigan State University

  1994

Awards & honors

• William T. Grant Foundation’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowsh…
• Ernest Hilgard Award for Lifetime contributions to psycholog…
• Named to the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and…
• President-elect of the Society for Research in Child Develop…