Tag Archives: academia

Who Researches My Communities? Speaking Out About the White Academic Gaze

As a queer Vietnamese American graduate student interested in pursuing an academic career, I sometimes worry about sharing views that may challenge dominant norms and ideologies. Some established academics of color have recommended I keep my mouth closed until tenure or after tenure, whereas others have said that if I minimize my voice, I will assimilate into the system that silences more radical perspectives. Because I value social justice, I wanted to reach beyond my fear to name and confront an issue I witness in academia that I will refer to as the white academic gaze, or when white researchers conduct research on people of color, especially without including them in the research and publication process.

These tweets exemplify the invasiveness of what I refer to as the white academic gaze.

The white academic gaze constitutes a serious issue in the field of psychological research because even though white people who conduct research on people of color may have good intentions, the act of doing so can feel extractive as well as an overreach of power. For example, years ago before I entered a PhD program, I spoke to a woman of color working as a doctoral student under a white woman in a clinical psychology program who researched Black and Latinx youths’ health outcomes. This doctoral student informed me that even though her PI published on Black and Latinx youth, she would often microaggress her own graduate students of color. I myself have witnessed white people who have published on Asian American communities who have proceeded to harm actual Asian Americans in interpersonal interactions. It saddens and angers me that white researchers can benefit from the struggles of communities of color even while hurting members of those communities.

Furthermore, even if a white researcher did not commit racist acts, their engagement with research on people of color still feels extractive. Racial inequity in psychological research persists in that while research on race is rare, even when research on race is conducted, it is often executed by white researchers. For example, I have observed white researchers win large grants to study the experiences of queer men of color. As a queer person of color myself, I first wonder if those researchers have examined their own complicity in racism, and I then wonder about all the marginalized queer researchers of color I know who struggle to enter academia or to make it in academia because they do not have the access to data necessary to publish. Given the numerous benefits of having faculty of color in university settings, I feel curious about what we can do to promote academics of color securing opportunities to conduct research on and with their own communities, so we can build a more equitable academy.

Though many perhaps consider science objective, I feel that privilege and oppression play a large part in who gets to conduct science. I will implicate myself here – for my undergraduate honors thesis, I examined the role of feminine norms on college women’s eating behaviors. Though I am in the process of exploring my gender identity now, at the time I had identified as a cisgender gay man who had always leaned into his femininity. I felt interested in examining how femininity may influence food intake, and I found the measures examining femininity within men lacking. After I graduated, I became sole author of that paper and proceeded to publish it. Looking back, I wish I had done more to include a woman on that paper, even though I had already written the entirety of the paper, such as by asking for help with the revisions. Or, I wish I had interrogated my privileges earlier on in the process and had collaborated with another woman in addition to my advisor from the beginning of the process. At the time I had identified as a cis man, so I wish I had asked myself: as someone who has benefited from male privilege, was it my place to conduct this research at all?

I will admit that as a queer graduate student of color, it does feel a bit scary to share these beliefs on a public forum. I remind myself though that I am allowed to make my voice heard and that I can thank the many writers of color who have come before me for guiding my own growth. For example, I think about Myriam Gurba, a queer Mexican American woman who courageously called out a white woman for advancing her own career through writing about Mexican people’s stories. Gurba’s intelligent, impassioned post sparked long-necessary discourse on how the publishing industry privileges white writers even when they write about communities of color. I feel that psychological research could benefit from a similar reckoning, especially given the American Psychological Association’s stated commitment to dismantling systemic racism.

As a future counseling psychologist, I firmly believe that both individual and systemic-level change are necessary. As an aspiring academic, I am committed to actually checking in with my students and asking them how they feel about my relationship with them, to mitigate the potential for harm and to practice actual accountability if I have hurt them. I will name power differentials that come from my position as an advisor as well as the power dynamics that emerge from our various privileged and marginalized social identities. I will continue to educate myself so that that burden does not fall on my students. Furthermore, I commit to knowing my own lane and supporting researchers doing research on and with their own communities, while reading more about how I can help decolonize research overall. I do hope academic journals will institute policies and practices that empower academics of color. At this point though, as a graduate student and early career researcher, I try to focus on what I can control. I do my best to take accountability for my own actions as I engage in advocacy and activism. I also remember to practice gratitude for the mentors I have had who have nurtured my passion for social justice-related research, as well as those who have nurtured my voice and my desire to speak out about injustices in the academy overall.

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Thomas Le, MS, is a doctoral candidate in Counseling Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research integrates counseling, cultural, and health psychology by focusing on how gender socialization and racism impact the development and maintenance of eating disorders and substance use in marginalized communities (e.g., Asian Americans, LGBTQ+ people of color). In their free time they enjoy laughing and processing with close friends, reading books about social justice and interpersonal relationships, and listening to Blackpink. You can contact him at tple[at]terpmail.umd.edu.

Where Science Meets Policy Part 1: Involving Stakeholders in Every Step of Your Research

Where Science Meets Policy

Part 1: Involving Stakeholders in Every Step of Your Research

Melanie Arenson, Renee Cloutier, Travis Loughran, Mary Fernandes

There is a well-known lack of consistent translation of scientific research into public policy. To address this, the scientific community has instituted a substantial push to involve “stakeholders” in our research, in order to make it more targeted, translatable, and impactful. But what does that mean practically, and how do we do it?

What is a stakeholder?

According to the American Psychological Association, stakeholders include anybody that could be influenced by the research you conduct (e.g., they have a “stake” in it). What does that look like? Well, imagine you’re developing a new intervention for adolescents. Stakeholders for such a project might include the people receiving and providing the treatment (e.g. the adolescent and therapist), as well as the child’s parents, teachers, and peers, the administrators in both the treatment setting and the school, and the policy-makers dictating the allocation of school-based resources. Depending on your area of research, this group of stakeholders may expand to include businesses, insurance companies, curriculum writers, and nonprofits.

Why involve them at all?

Too often in academic settings, we formulate a question, conduct the research in our labs, find exciting results, publish a paper in an academic journal, and then that research gets cited by other academics in other academic journals. The problem with that? The information we’ve discovered doesn’t ever actually leave the world in which it was created.

Stakeholders, if engaged properly, are uniquely positioned in two ways to help change that: (1) their opinions can be sought to ensure that the questions we ask, the research paradigms we create, and the treatments we develop appropriately reflect the real-world applications that interested us in the first place; and (2) they hold connections that can help with dissemination when we find those really cool results. They are mired in the frequently messy reality that we try to emulate in our labs, and understand what is feasible and what isn’t because they live it, day to day, in a way we as researchers rarely do. They also hold connections in the community and have specialized insights into the most appropriate and impactful way to translate our research to the populations that need to hear it the most.

So how do we involve them?

This can depend on your setting, but below are a few options:

1)    Use your existing network. Most likely, you can think of a few stakeholders you already know, whether in a professional or personal context. One of the easiest ways to get stakeholders involved is to ask those people to have coffee with you and chat. If they’re interested in what you’re doing they might be a good person to get involved, but they also can likely suggest people they know that might be able to help.

2)    Focus groups are extremely helpful. They can be used as sources for more permanent stakeholder involvement (e.g. you can recruit stakeholders that will remain involved for the duration of the project), but they also are formalized way to engage stakeholders just as they are.  Recruit as broad of a range of stakeholders as you can, know the questions you want to ask, and be prepared to lightly guide a discussion. Keep in mind that it may be helpful to group participants by stakeholder type, depending on your project and the diversity of stakeholders. If someone seems particularly insightful, motivated, and you think they may be good fit for your research team, talk to them about the possibility of getting more involved (and keep a list of these types of people as possible stakeholders for future projects!).

3)   Use conferences to build connections. When you’re talking to colleagues about your research, don’t forget to talk about recruiting stakeholders (they may know someone that would be a perfect fit!), and attend talks that are related to the research you want to do as they may give you an idea for stakeholders you haven’t thought of. Check the program for any stakeholder-related gatherings, which may include a talk by patients, booths run by educators and/or companies, or division-specific events related to specific providers.

4)   Don’t forget about your professional organizations. Many organizations have committees and departments dedicated to influencing and crafting policy. These sub-organizations can connect you and your academic work to the policy arenas you want to influence. Reach out to committee members and tell them about your research and the implications you think it has. They’ll be perfectly positioned to help you translate your findings to the community stakeholders you want to reach. They also may be able to direct you resources and stakeholders you haven’t thought of.

5)   Finally, use your research. Talk to your participants, their parents, and the community connections you use to recruit your sample, and ask them if they would like a summary of your findings once your research is complete. If you haven’t already built a relationship with them, offering to reach out (and taking the time to do it!) is a great foundation. Similar to focus groups, if you think any of those people would be a good fit for your research, offer the opportunity for them to get involved in future projects.

Breaking the academic loop:

Once you have successfully designed, executed, and analyzed your research project, how do you convey the findings to a broad range of stakeholders? Researchers and policy makers often have different decision-making processes, time-lines, vocabularies, and incentives (Brownson, Royer, Ewing, & McBride, 2006; Grande et al., 2014), which create barriers to effective communication. Overcoming these barriers requires several, multi-level actions, many of which will be addressed in this series. Follow us for our next piece on how to write academic papers for a broad range of stakeholders.

 

References:

Brownson, R. C., Royer, C., Ewing, R., & McBride, T. D. (2006). Researchers and policymakers: travelers in parallel universes. American journal of preventive medicine, 30(2), 164-172.

Grande, D., Gollust, S. E., Pany, M., Seymour, J., Goss, A., Kilaru, A., & Meisel, Z. (2014). Translating research for health policy: researchers’ perceptions and use of social media. Health Affairs, 33(7), 1278-1285.

 

APAGS Funds Five Programmatic Grants to Boost Recruitment and Retention of Diverse Doctoral Students in Psychology

At the end of 2018, the APAGS Committee invested in a brand new award program to support institutional recruitment and retention of diverse doctoral students in psychology and closely related programs by engaging current graduate students in such efforts.  The number of applications received for the “APAGS Student Diversity Initiative Award” surpassed expectations and made this APAGS award highly competitive. A team of committee members awarded five institutions approximately $3,000 each to help them implement new initiatives or support existing programs, committees, and resources. APAGS defined diversity to include identification by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, ability/disability, religion, language, socioeconomic status, and age.

The following five winners are to be congratulated for their efforts and wished every success as they move forward on proposed initiatives:

Authors from Emory University School of Medicine proposed a training and mentoring program for students of color pursuing graduate education in psychology. The funding will support a weekend workshop for undergraduate students of color interested in pursuing a career in psychology, materials for attendees, and follow-up evaluation of the program’s success. Faculty from across Atlanta will provide training to attendees on the graduate school application process and pertinent issues of discrimination and social justice, and attendees will be paired with graduate student mentors.

Old Dominion University and the Virginia Consortium Program in Clinical Psychology, through the ODU Research Foundation, secured funds to repeat and expand a successful workshop to assist local minority students in developing and preparing a successful application to graduate programs in clinical psychology. Funding would support the workshop by providing attendees with transportation to and dinner at the workshop, GRE preparation materials, and other resources.

University of Houston’s School Psychology Program proposed an immersion program to cultivate culturally responsive service. Funding will go to students who identify as culturally and linguistically diverse to support their participation in training experiences associated with the multilingual training track, specifically an immersion trip to Mexico. This program has the potential to help the program’s reputation for its emphasis in supporting school psychology trainees who are fluent in languages other than English.

University of Massachusetts Boston’s Clinical Psychology Program secured funding for a Student Diversity Coordinator, a current graduate student who will be hired to update recruitment materials (including brochures and digital narratives), serve as a consultant to faculty members looking to share external funding opportunities with admitted students, and coordinate a greatly expanded peer mentoring program to ensure the successful transition into and through doctoral study.

Virginia Commonwealth University’s Clinical Psychology Program secured funds to support various purposes aimed at recruitment and retention, including: An informal meeting between applicants and doctoral students from diverse backgrounds during admission interviews; providing applicants from diverse backgrounds with travel funds to facilitate their participation in this informal meeting; forming a group to foster the professional development and social support of underrepresented students; and bringing in a speaker to address the intersection of clinical work, cultural humility, and social justice to improve the inclusion of diverse perspectives in clinical training.

The APAGS Committee hopes to issue similar awards in future years.

Research can be fun, I promise: A guide to getting undergraduates involved in research

We all remember how overwhelming our first few years of our undergraduate studies were. Psychology may have been our major, but there was so much information being presented in introductory courses, it was hard to know exactly what that word really meant. What did psychologists actually do all day? I know when I was a sophomore, I still thought that all psychologists were basically Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs– sneaking into storage units late at night to explore a killer’s wares, examining dead bodies for clues to how they reached their demise, having intimate and revealing conversations with a serial killer through 4-inch Plexiglas. Such action-oriented images defined psychology for me. It pushed any ideas of sitting behind a desk, performing scientific experiments and analyzing data, to the very back of my mind.

Luckily, I had a bunch of very patient, but very direct, mentors who introduced me to the value of research. And I am not talking about just the “oh, now I have another line to put on my CV” sort of value. We all can remember the first time we found a significant effect size with data we had personally collected and pored over every detail of. There comes a shining moment when you realize that you have added something to the field of psychology! My mentors taught me that all the hand-wringing that came before that moment was worth it, and soon “researcher” became a part of my definition of a psychologist.

Now, I am on the other side, working as the graduate assistant for an undergraduate research program. Graduate students have a unique connection with undergraduates in our department – although, like faculty, we are older and more experienced, it is often easier for the undergraduates to connect with us. We are also still in the weeds of academia, often closer in age, and spend a lot of time focused in on the same areas. So for the undergraduates in our lab, in the classes we teach, or just at department events, we can become a major mentoring voice. In essence, we have a choice – we can simply go about our expected duties, or we can push ourselves a little farther. We can reach out to undergraduate students to introduce them to the world of psychological science.

Of course, that isn’t always easy. Undergraduates face a lot of obstacles in regards to research, and no, it isn’t just the obstacle of eating so much ramen that they cannot get into the lab. Undergrads often avoid research because:

  1. “Research” does not fit into their schema of “psychologist”.

Teaching these students, who may think of psychology a solely consisting of clinical work (or, in my case, forensic clinical work) how research can fit into the picture is invaluable. Speak to your undergrads about your work, and connect it directly to clinical experience. Bring current research into the classroom. Discuss with students your own experiences of doing both hands on work with clients and future-oriented work with science. Eventually, the connection will click.

2. They think that they do not know enough and will make too many mistakes

Undergraduate students (and graduate students as well, honestly) may become stuck in the paradoxical loop that they do not want to attempt anything new for fear that they will not do it perfectly the first time, or that they will disappoint their superiors. As a student who has certainly made mistakes yourself (likely in the recent past!), you can be the one to break that infinite circle of passivity. Talk about your own mistakes, even if you are not directly prompted. Use them as teaching moments for that specific task, but also as a general teaching moment that no one is ever perfect. Mistakes often lead to the most valuable teaching experiences. And as for not knowing enough, remind them –  research is for exactly that purpose, when we don’t know enough, we seek out the answer. You are learning as you go along, and this field is all about jumping in and get your hands dirty. The earlier you do it, the more you will learn.

3. It is an ambiguous concept.

Lots of what we learn in undergraduate psychology is concrete; problems are described and solutions presented. In research, you have to identify the problems, or areas of uncertainty, and hypothesize solutions. Simply coming up with these two things – a research problem and a hypothesis – can be arduous enough. And it becomes even more difficult when we realize that even the most well-thought out hypotheses do not always work out.

Encourage undergraduates to draw on what they already know, and then to take a risk. Research requires taking a dip into the unknown, which is inherently risky because it is uncharted territory. Being walked through the less-defined steps for the first time can prove to be a very helpful experience. Ask undergrads to act as research assistants for your projects, and have them do more than just data collecting. Introduce them to how you came up with the research question, the IRB approval process, show them the write-up. If possible, invite them to come to conferences with you so that they can get a taste of it (and get some free vendor pens). Be the guide for the first leg of this uncharted journey, but then step back once the journey has begun. The students will realize that their risk can reap reward.

4. They do not know how to ask for guidance

Often, even if an undergraduate student is ready to integrate research into their life and jump into a pool of potential mistakes and ambiguity, they may not know how to ask for help. As graduate students, you can be an enormously helpful resource. Be inviting to undergraduates that want to come to your labs. Encourage undergraduates in your classes to speak with you after class if they are interested in research, and be willing (or knowledgeable about other labs where you can refer them) to refer them based on their topic of interest.

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Today’s undergraduates will be our future lab partners, classmates, and eventual colleagues. It is important that we begin to build their foundation of science from the very beginning – science is an integral part of moving psychology from the past into the present, to make treatments more effective, and to make lives better. After all, Clarice Starling may have had all of the action sequences, but she may have never solved the case of Buffalo Bill without the scientists identifying the moth.


Editor’s Note: Fallon Kane is a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the Derner School of Psychology. Her research focuses on personality pathology and interpersonal relationships, and personality change with age. 

 

The Learning Scientists: Our Story

LSLogo200x200Recently, I had been trying to come up with creative ways to help my students link concepts from class to the real world. Improving learning is one connection. But there are many others, such as how we might frame an advertisement to help it sell, or how we can improve procedures in the criminal justice system to avoid false convictions – like Steven Avery’s first conviction. (The many who watched Making a Murderer have probably thought a lot about this connection to cognitive psychology, possibly without realizing how much of a role it plays!) Anyway, I decided to create an assignment requiring my students to interact with one another and make connections with popular psychology-related articles on Twitter. The first step was creating a Twitter profile for myself, and building it up with psychology-related tweets.

One random night, I saw that Yana was tweeting many messages to a lot of different Twitter handles. It turns out Yana had been feeling guilty that she wasn’t doing more to reach out to the community with her work on improving study strategies. Somewhat impulsively, she tried searching “test tomorrow” on Twitter, and realized that TONS of students were tweeting about upcoming exams. Many students were tweeting about being unprepared, not knowing how to study, or being unable to concentrate.

So, Yana started tweeting advice and encouragement to the students: wishing them luck on their exams, asking them what strategies they used to study, and whether they’d tried practice questions or writing out everything they knew on the topic from memory. I thought it was such a cool idea that I decided to join in. I suggested we start using the hashtag #AceThatTest, and overnight that hashtag had turned into our joint Twitter account: @AceThatTest. That was January 22nd, 2016.

Since then – in under a month – we have gained almost 700 followers on Twitter, tweeted well over 2,000 times, hired a student intern, made a website with a blog (learningscientists.org), been asked to help out with a book on learning, and forged many new connections with researchers and educators around the world. The project really took off in ways that I think neither of us had anticipated! The passion we both bring to the project comes from our mutual frustration with the lack of communication between science and educational practice.

We want to improve communication between the various educational experts. Education is an extremely important topic, and we believe that there are many experts in this realm, each bringing an important perspective that can serve to improve education. Teachers who have been practicing in the classroom for years are experts. Students, by the time they graduate high school, and may be considering entering into higher education, have 13 years of educational experience under their belts, and could be considered experts. Professors, like Yana and myself, who both research learning (sometimes in the lab, sometimes in live classrooms) and teach undergraduate students in our own classrooms are experts. Professors who are working with teachers in training in institutions of higher education are experts.

If you have an “it takes a village” mentality, like we do, then the idea of having so many experts with diverse experiences and perspectives is extremely exciting. No one person can solve every problem that comes up, but a diverse group has serious potential to get things done. Unfortunately, many of these groups are not communicating with one another as much as we believe they should be. The situation is not entirely dissimilar from the schism between research and practice in clinical psychology. In an ideal world, researchers would clearly communicate their findings and make them easily accessible to practitioners. Meanwhile, practitioners would communicate any practical concerns they have with implementation to inform further research. Yet instead of this type of symbiotic relationship, there is a strained relationship between clinical practice and clinical research, and the lines of communication are not as open as they should be, and need to be if we want clinical psychology to be maximally beneficial for the profession and the public as a whole. Clinical psychologists know this, and have been addressing the problem; there have even been special APA Convention programs and even special journal issues to address the lack of communication.

The same problem occurs in education – communication is simply not open, and it’s time for the many educational experts to address this. We have to talk to each other if we want to improve education. It seems to us that we can’t complain about a lack of communication while keeping our heads down in our own silos. For this reason, Yana and I started the Learning Scientists community.

Please help us spread the word, and open lines of communication between all education experts. There are many opportunities for you to get involved: Tell colleagues outside of psychology about this work, follow us on Twitter and tweet at us, comment on our blog, or even write a piece on something you’re passionate about and send it to us. You can get in touch with us through our website via our “contact us” tab, or on Twitter @AceThatTest.

LScientists Banner200x849About the authors:

MeganSmithMegan Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at Rhode Island College. She received her Master’s in Experimental Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Purdue University. Megan’s area of expertise is in human learning and memory, and applying the science of learning in educational contests. 

YanaWeinsteinYana Weinstein is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She received her PhD in Psychology from University College London and had 4 years of postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis. The broad goal of her research is to help students make the most of their academic experience. 

Together they co-founded the Learning Scientists (@AceThatTest on Twitter) to make scientific research more accessible to students and educators.