About this poster

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Panel information
Panel 6. Risk, Intervention, Prevention, and Action

Abstract

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Introduction: During the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPI) experienced dramatic spikes in racism, with anti-Asian hate crimes increasing by up to 339% (Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, 2021). Further concerning is the evidence that discrimination and related race-based traumatic stress result in significant distress for AANHPI groups (Ermis-Demirtas et al., 2022; Yang et al., 2023). Thus, there is an urgent need to identify how AANHPI communities may be buffered from the deleterious effects of racism. Though some efforts have already been made to identify individual coping behaviors that contribute to AANHPI resilience (Oh et al., 2022), none to our knowledge examined how AANHPI communities collectively resist racial trauma. Radical healing is a strengths-based framework that integrates the dual realities that 1) racism can be perpetrated and maintained by individuals and broader systems and 2) the healing of communities of color can also move beyond individual-level coping to multisystemic resilience (French et al., 2020). Understanding how AANHPI emerging adults engage in radical healing, an anti-racist method of collective healing, may guide the development of programs that may prevent and address racial trauma symptoms. The current study aims to identify patterns of radical healing in AANHPI communities and to examine the relationship between latent profiles of radical healing and individual coping.

Method: Participants were 459 AANHPI emerging adults (Mage = 26.59 years, SDage = 9.54 years) who were primarily female-identifying (77.30%), and who completed an online survey via Qualtrics. The most represented ethnic group was Chinese American (31.70%). Recruitment occurred online through Asian-serving organizations across the country. Participants reported on five dimensions of radical healing using mostly standardized and validated measures for each construct: collectivism, critical consciousness, radical hope, strength and resistance, and cultural authenticity and self-knowledge. Participants also reported on their individual coping (Brief Resilient Coping Scale; Sinclair & Wallston, 2004).

Analyses: Several latent profile analysis models were estimated using Mplus 8.10, with profiles ranging from a 2– to a 4–Class solution. The final model was selected based on class composition. Finally, the BCH approach, which accounts for the classification uncertainty error, was used to examine the relationship between the identified radical healing profiles and individual coping (Bakk & Kuha, 2015).

Results: The 4–Class solution yielded the best fit indices (See Table 1), however, the 2–Class solution was selected as the best class-composition model given that the other models did not meet the standard threshold of at least 25 cases or 5% of the overall sample per profile (Spurk et al., 2020). Contrary to expectations, analyses indicated a high degree of similarity among the two identified profiles, which both indicated high collectivism, perceived inequality, egalitarianism, motivation, radical hope, strength and resilience, and cultural authenticity and self-knowledge, but low sociopolitical activation (See Figure 1). We found that there was a significant difference in individual coping averages between the profiles. Specifically, class 2 was associated with greater levels of individual coping than class 1 (ꭓ2 = 4.52, p = 0.03).

Discussion: Findings elucidate how AANHPI emerging adults engage in radical healing following discriminatory experiences. Notably, the results indicate that some AANHPI individuals demonstrate particularly high resistance to racism by engaging concurrently in individual and collective coping. Future work should assess how radical healing profiles and coping patterns relate to mental health outcomes, particularly during developmental periods associated with identity development and exploration (e.g., adolescence and emerging adulthood). Taken together, the results may inform the development of community-based interventions leveraging radical healing to address racial trauma among AANHPI communities.

Author information

Author	Role
Adrelys Mateo Santana, University of Southern California	Presenting author
Elayne Zhou, University of Southern California, United States	Non-presenting author
Wendy Chu, University of South Carolina, United States	Non-presenting author
Andrea Ng, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, United States	Non-presenting author

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