In my dissertation, I broadly investigate social essentialism across three studies. More specifically, I examined three particular types of essentialist beliefs: stability, strict boundary, and homogeneity beliefs. In the first two studies, I explored the mechanisms through which children and adults come to understand race as a stable construct. A third study built upon this work to inform the development of interventions designed to enhance cognitive flexibility and ultimately reduce intergroup conflict. In Study 1, I looked at children’s stability beliefs and how they differed based on a child’s age and racial background (monoracial Black versus biracial Black). This concept has been understudied among children of color in present day society, resulting in outdated and disjointed research. Results from Study 1 indicated that the development of race essentialism looked differently for monoracial Black and biracial Black children until age 7 at which point the two groups looked similar. Subsequently, I was interested in building upon Study 1 and examining stability beliefs at the other end of the lifespan to consider adults’ race essentialism. Existing research links essentialism with stereotyping and discrimination among adults, warranting a more nuanced understanding of its development and maintenance over time. More specifically, in Study 2, I investigated how levels of race essentialism varied based upon demographic variables. Lastly, in Study 3, I examined children’s sensitivity to information presented on a continuum as opposed to categorically and the impact such framing had on their similarity judgments and inferences about behavior. Children of color from low-income backgrounds who received the continuum framing were able to perceive greater variability within members of the same group and greater similarity between members of different groups, corroborating previous work with 4-year-old middle- to upper middle-income children. Lastly, the final chapter of this dissertation addresses the implications of these findings for the field of education as well as clinical practice. Taken together, these results have the potential to inform classroom teachers, caregivers, and clinicians about the importance of encouraging the development of cognitive flexibility, especially in the context of social categories. / 2021-06-03T00:00:00Z

Critical consciousness refers to the process by which individuals increase awareness of the forces that perpetuate societal injustice and develop a sense of efficacy and empowerment to challenge them (Jemal, 2017). Critical consciousness has been correlated with aspects of positive youth development such as mental health and improved academic and civic engagement. However, less is known about the specific factors that may contribute to critical consciousness among youth, and particularly among White youth, who are under-studied with regard to their role in dismantling injustices in their environments. As such, this exploratory study aimed to examine the extent to which mental health indicators (i.e., presence of wellbeing and absence of psychological distress) and factors related to peer, parent, and school socialization (i.e., political discussions with peers, intergroup contact, political discussions with parents, and school-level critical consciousness) were associated with each dimension of critical consciousness (critical reflection, critical motivation, and critical action) among White adolescents. Additionally, given links between critical consciousness and taking action to challenge injustice, this study also explored the extent to which each dimension of critical consciousness related to self-reported bystander behaviors during incidents of bias-based harassment at school. Participants (n = 374 White high school students) completed an online survey which assessed critical consciousness, mental health (wellbeing and psychological distress), factors related to peer, parent, and school socialization, and self-reported bystander behaviors when witnessing bias-based harassment at their schools. Of the various factors explored, results consistently indicated a significant, positive association between youths’ general wellbeing and dimensions of critical consciousness. Additionally, critical motivation was the only dimension of critical consciousness that was significantly associated with self-reported bystander behaviors while witnessing bias-based harassment at school, suggesting that the development of motivation and efficacy to act against injustice may be an important component of intervention programs seeking to reduce bias-based harassment in schools. These findings contribute to the growing body of literature on critical consciousness among adolescents, as researchers increasingly seek to understand factors that support critical consciousness development, as well as the extent to which critical consciousness promotes action to combat injustice and inequity, particularly among White youth. Findings also have practical implications for school-based efforts to prevent bias-based harassment among youth, in that they indicate a relation between critical motivation (or perceived efficacy in the ability to challenge injustice) and bystander behaviors. / 2025-08-24T00:00:00Z

148 undergraduate students acted as mock jurors in a study that manipulated the following variables to assess their influence on Subjects' determination of guilt and sentencing severity of a criminal defendant: race of defendant, social economic status (SES) of defendant, race of victim, and credibility of defense attorney. A chi square analysis of the relationship between the four independent variables and verdict found defendant SES and attorney quality/credibility to be significant. A 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 anova for sentence length found a main effect of attorney quality and a significant interaction between defendant race and SES. A factorial anova on the projected likelihood of the defendant to commit a criminal act in the future found main effects for defendant SES and attorney 1 quality. Factor analysis of a ten-item semantic differential questionnaire found that subjects rated defendants of high SES as having significantly more integrity than defendants of low SES. Support for stereotype attribution theory, which asserts that much racial stereotyping is based on an inference of social class, was found.

The presence of large numbers of chronically mentally ill clients in the community has been the focus of considerable attention in the literature in recent years. The trend toward deinstitutionalization and the growth of the Community Mental Health Center (CMHC) movement have profoundly altered treatment for this population. Past research highlighted the fragmented and inadequate attention given this group, but major changes in funding mechanisms to the CMHCs that have serviced these clients have had a decided impact on service delivery, with the reported result of prioritized attention to chronic clients. This new emphasis on services to a much lower-functioning client population has direct implications for CMHCs. The present study looks at the effects of recent funding and program emphases on chronically disabled clients receiving services from the Seattle-King County area in 1983. Chronically mentally ill clients were compared with both acutely disturbed and higher-functioning clients on demographic variables, service totals, types of services received, dropout status and staff assignment. Differences among the three groups both in demographics, staff assignment and patterns of service utilization were found, with the lower-functioning groups receiving more total services. The responsiveness of this particular CMHC system to the chronically mentally ill is highlighted and discussed.

This study investigated the effect of supervision training on participating school counselors’ supervision knowledge and supervisor self-efficacy. A randomized experimental research design allowed the unbiased examination of outcomes associated with participation in the Site Supervision Training for School Counselors (SST-SC) program. The researcher conducted repeated measures analyses of variance to explore the effect of a seven-week, asynchronous online site supervision training intervention on school counselors’ supervision knowledge and supervisor self-efficacy. The results indicated a statistically significant main effect for time for supervision knowledge, with both groups showing an increase in test scores from pre- to post-test, regardless of participation in the SST-SC program. The results also revealed a statistically significant main effect for time for supervisor self-efficacy, with the intervention group showing an increase in test scores over time and the waitlist control group showing no significant change in test scores from pre- to post-test. The results from this study provided insight about the effects of supervision training for school counselors.

The aim of this qualitative study was to capture the experiences of master's levelcounselors-in-training who take transpersonal counseling courses. Instructors of such courses aim both to help students develop competence in counseling clients who have had transpersonal experiences--those that, despite their occurrence beyond the usual limits of reality, are believed by experiencers to be real (Holden, 1999), and to promote counselor development (Walker, 2022). Participants were four students who had completed such a course, two each from two U.S. universities, one located in the Southwest and the other in the East. I conducted a transcendental phenomenological analysis by interviewing participants, collecting their follow-up journals, transcribing the interviews, coding the transcriptions, categorizing the codes, and thematized the categories to identify some major underlying facets of counselors’-in-training experiences in their courses. Participants reported increased belief in the importance of transpersonal topics in counseling, willingness to address transpersonal topics in counseling, and competence in addressing multicultural transpersonal clinical issues, as well as experiences of holistic development and shifts in clinical focus as a result of involvement with their courses. The outcomes of this study will be used to advance the literature on spiritual counseling competence, counselor development, and the inclusion of transpersonal phenomena in counselor education.

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Latinx/é individuals are disproportionately affected by lack of access to healthcare which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These barriers have resulted in worse health outcomes, especially for Latinx/é immigrants. The present study used a mixed-methods design to determine what barriers exist for the Latinx/é community when accessing healthcare in a post-COVID-19 era, where telehealth services have changed the way individuals receive healthcare. A convergent mixed-methods design that includes qualitative interviews and published surveys that assess healthcare access with Latinx/é individuals with experience in the healthcare system was employed to assess this question. Results of this study showed that there are still several barriers that exist for the Latinx/é immigrant population when accessing healthcare. Barriers included: insurance, cost, accessing specialist care, wait times/availability, lack of information/education and technology. However, results also highlighted facilitators to accessing healthcare as well, some of which, depending on context, overlapped as a barrier as well. Facilitators included: Community, insurance, information/education and technology. Implications from this study are discussed for healthcare providers to improve healthcare practice, to better inform immigration policy and to ultimately reduce the barriers that have hindered Latinx/é immigrant community’s access to healthcare.