My Research Project – Rowan Klar

I’m very lucky and privileged to have the opportunity to work on a project that I am genuinely passionate about this summer. My research mentor is a graduate student in social psychology and she focuses a lot on stigma research. She gave me the opportunity to create my own research from scratch. I’m really interested in weight stigma and bias, so we chose to create a study that explores how and why people perceive weight-based microaggressions displayed by a mother targeting her daughter. We’re exposing participants to vignettes in which a mother portrays these microaggressions and asking them to identify if they recognized weight-based microaggressions in the scene. We’re manipulating the weight status of the child (normal weight, overweight, or obese) to see how that affects the recognition of bias. From there, we are going to determine the amount of “antifat” bias the participants have. We are going to analyze the data and draw conclusions regarding whether or not people recognize weight-based microaggressions, whether the weight status of the child impacts those recognitions, and if “antifat” attitudes exasperate those recognitions. 

Overall, it’s been a great experience to see how the whole research process works and to be able to create something of my own (with the help of my amazing mentor, of course). I’m passionate about these topics both because of personal experience, and my professional aspirations and because I think this type of research is needed. It’s important that people become more aware of their own biases and that professionals in fields such as psychology understand the ways in which people recognize and respond to microaggressions. Weight stigma is extremely pervasive in our society and it’s fairly accepted. I believe that it’s a social justice issue and we need to work to undo ideas of what “normal” bodies are and how we treat people that don’t fit into our standards of “normal.”