With funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Immigration and Ethnicity Institute (IEI) at Florida International University (FIU) has begun a three-year research project to examine the role of religion in the civic life of immigrant and native minority youth in the greater Miami area.  The project focuses specifically on religion's influence on cultural and social identity formation.  Using qualitative methods, the research will compare Catholic, mainstream Protestant, fundamentalist Protestant, and Afro-Carribean (Santería and Vodou) religions.  It will also compare across the six most important immigrant and native minority groups in Miami - Cuban, Nicaraguans, Mexicans, Haitians, English-speaking West Indians and African Americans.  The research will incorporate a transnational component that will permit us to disentangle behaviors that are prompted by immigration versus those that existed before the immigrants left their home countries.  By using as a starting point a sample of adolescents from a recently completed five-year study of immigrant and native minority adolescents in Miami, the research will also be longitudinal.     The buttons on this page provide links to award winning essays by FIU students on this general topic, "Student Prize Papers", and to Working Papers that the project has produces so far, "Working Papers".  For further information, contact the Immigration and Ethnicity Institute at (305) 348-1519.