About this poster

---

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

Abstract

---

Discrimination is a prevalent, chronic, and harmful stressor that youth of color by necessity have to cope with. Yet, there are very few measurements that assess the specific and unique strategies that youth may enact in response to racism-related stress. Furthermore, youth likely use a variety of coping strategies depending on the situation and type of discrimination. In order to understand what coping strategies youth use in the face of discrimination, qualitative interviews were conducted with 28 youth of color (39% Latinx, 39% Asian American, and 21% African American; 50% female) living in southeastern United States. All participants were either current high schoolers or had just graduated high school (Mage = 16, SD = 1.5). Interviews were an hour-long and semi-structured. In each interview, participants were asked about various types of discrimination they may have faced, including peer discrimination, teacher discrimination, other adult discrimination, online discrimination, and vicarious discrimination. Each participant was asked about peer discrimination and teacher discrimination first. With the time left, the subsequent forms of discrimination were asked about in a randomized order. If a participant did not endorse any personal experience related to the type of discrimination, then the scenario was skipped and the next form of discrimination was queried. For each experience the participant did endorse, they were asked to describe the most recent example and then were asked the same set of questions around what they did in the moment to feel better and what they did afterwards. Transcripts were coded using applied thematic analysis to identify and categorize coping strategies utilized. Then, through examining patterns of coping within each participant, profiles of coping were identified.

Four different profiles were found. There were Active and Support-Seeking copers (N = 6) who endorsed confronting others, advocacy, and telling authority figures as well as seeking support from family and friends as main coping strategies with some use of cognitive reappraisals as well. There were also Disengaged and Distracted copers (N = 8) who reported high levels of distracting themselves through shifting focus or engaging in other activities as well as ignoring, pretending it did not happen, and letting it pass. This group exhibited some support-seeking and little to no confronting. Thirdly, another group was termed Ignoring with Reframes (N = 5). Youth in this group heavily relied on ignoring in conjunction with reappraising the situation such as minimizing the event, making excuses for the perpetrator, acceptance, and meaning-making. The last group was the largest group termed Flexible Copers (N = 9). These youth used a diffuse number of coping strategies, such as confronting, ignoring, support seeking, distraction, and cognitive reappraisals. Overall, no group relied on only one coping strategy. Results indicate that future research on coping with racism should use within-person analyses to examine how different coping strategies coalesce to predict youth outcomes. Implications for measurement of coping with racism are discussed as well as future directions for the continued study of how minoritized youth cope with racism-related stress.

⇦ Back to session