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The growing presence and visibility of mixed race persons in the US demands that social workers critically examine and understand the complexity of multiracial identity. This qualitative investigation examined the narratives of ten multiracial adults about their identity experiences living as multiracial persons. Utilizing paradigmatic analysis of narratives, five major themes emerged. Four of these themes correspond to categories found in existing multiracial scholarship, and include: (1) Shifting racial/ethnic expressions; (2) Racial/ethnic ambiguity; (3) Feeling like an outsider; and (4) Seeking community. The final theme, (5) Racial resistance, contributes new knowledge to our understanding of how multiracial individuals respond to societal pressures to conform to traditional means of categorizing others by race. Findings from this study confirm a collective multiracial experience; one with direct ties to the social and environmental pressures associated with having a multifaceted identity in a color-conscious society. Practice implications and directions for future research are offered.

Multiraciality in the United States of America -- Doing family multiracially -- Theorizing multiracial identity development -- Practice model of multiracial cultural attunement -- Critical reflexivity and engagement with multiracial individuals and families -- Exploration and collaborating in action with multiracial individuals and families.

Despite astonishing growth in the multiracial population since 2010 and increased empirical scholarship on the experiences of persons from two or more racial groups, little progress has been made to extend multiracial identity development theory. Drawing from constructivist grounded theory and multiple visual grounded theory (VGT) frameworks, our secondary qualitative study analyzed 26 participatory diagrams from two previous qualitative studies examining multiracial identity development. In alignment with our novel VGT analytic approach, we co-constructed a visual theoretical model that more accurately represents the dynamism between complex developmental and ecological processes that interactively influence multiracial identity development over time. Our findings suggest that multiracial identity development is a dynamic process influenced by critical events and experiences, including trauma and abuse, movement of place, and turning points and milestones that mutually shape a multiracial person's social environments, interpersonal relationships, and sense of self. Reflecting on our innovative study, we advocate for more critical, emancipatory methods like VGT that have the potential to overcome epistemological barriers in research that restrict the more accurate and complete storytelling of the multiracial experience.