Peace Odiase
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Research Mentor(s): Natasha Johnson
Co-Presenter: Andino, Wisdom
Research Mentor School/College/Department: / Public Health
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Oral5
Session: Session 3 – 1:40pm – 2:30 pm
Room: Breakout room 1
Authors: Peace Odiase, Natasha Johnson
Presenter: 2
Abstract
To address the inadequate number of studies that focus on youth’s understanding of the types of racism, this project will utilize mixed methods to develop and validate the Multidimensional Awareness of Racism Scale (MARS). Constructing this scale will require three phases. Firstly, through 1) item development, we will pinpoint a domain (racism awareness) and create a list of items for the scale through inductive and deductive methods (e.g., semi-structured interviews and literature review). Then, in the 2) scale development phase, we will pre-test the scale items through cognitive interviews and collect data from online surveys. This step will also include a reduction of items through exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to perform an extraction of factors. Lastly, 3) the scale evaluation stage will involve testing the dimensionality of the scale and confirmatory factor analysis to check the validity of the scale. After finalizing MARS, we believe that the attained understanding of Black youth’s perception of racism will have several impacts. These include improving clinical approaches to racial stress/trauma, enhancing research studies that examine how racism affects Black families, and providing evidence to support anti-racism interventions. Another one of our goals is to create interventions that will strengthen coping skills that counter the mental health consequences of racism. An aspect of phase 1 of our project is a qualitative analysis of the semi-structured interview. To simulate this process, the research assistants in our lab performed thematic coding of 21 visual artworks of Detroit Public Schools students. These pieces were part of the school district’s winter 2020 Arts in Action contest. We noticed several recurring themes across the art pieces. However, to validate these themes, we conducted an inter-rater reliability test to validate the themes. By examining these themes, we can make some inferences about what youths understand about racism.
Public Health
