Dr. Danice Brown and Dr. Tracy Tylka
Racial Discrimination and Resilience in African American Young Adults:
Examining Racial Socialization as a Moderator
Abstract
Research has indicated that racial discrimination places African Americans at risk for psychological distress, in which they experience low levels of well-being. Yet many African Americans are resilient, or have preserved well-being, when faced with this adversity. Using a strength-based approach, this study determined whether racial socialization messages preserved African Americans’ resilience when experiencing racial discrimination. Results with a sample of 290 young adult African American college students indicated that overall racial socialization messages, as well as specific messages to appreciate cultural legacy, moderated the relationship between racial discrimination and resilience. As expected, racial discrimination was negatively related to resilience for students who reported fewer racial socialization messages, and racial discrimination was no longer negatively associated with resilience for students reporting a greater number of these messages. Additionally, racial socialization messages predicted unique variance in resilience.
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Biographies:
Dr. Danice L. Brown received her Ph.D in Counseling Psychology from The Ohio State University in 2008. Her graduate training included a year-long APA approved predoctoral internship at the University of Illinois at Chicago Counseling Center. She is currently a professor in the Clinical Adult Psychology Graduate Program at SIUE. Dr. Brown is currently teaching undergraduate courses in multicultural psychology and careers in psychology. Her research interests include African American resiliency, racial socialization, racial discrimination, and multicultural issues in psychotherapy and higher education. Her work has been published in the Journal of Black Psychology and Children and Youth Services Review and has been presented at the annual conference of the American Psychological Association and the Winter Round Table at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Tracy Tylka is a Professor of Psychology at the Columbus and Marion campuses of The Ohio State University. She attended the University of Akron for her undergraduate and graduate studies, earning my B.A. in Psychology in 1995, M.A. in Counseling Psychology in 1998, and Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology in 2001. Dr. Tylka completed her pre-doctoral internship at the counseling center at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She joined the Department of Psychology at The Ohio State University as an Assistant Professor in 2001, received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 2007, and was promoted to Full Professor in 2013. |