Mini Research part 3

Graduate Students of Color Sense of Belong, Ethnic Identify and Mental Health

RESEARCH DESIGN

Introduction

This chapter describes the methodology to be used in the present study. It begins with a description of the methodological approach and rationale. The sections that follows the rationale discusses elements of the research design, including participants, the proposed data collection methods, instrumentations, procedures and data analysis procedures that will be utilized for this study. For the purpose of the study a quantitative method will be used as a viable mode of research to explore the how students’ ethnicity influences their sense of belonging and the relationship of sense of belonging and psychology symptoms experienced by students of color. Understanding sense of belonging from the students’ perspective is an essential component to researching this construct among college population (Bettez, 2010; Hurtado & Carter, 1997). Therefore, a quantitative approach to this study will depict a more complex understanding of students perceived sense of belonging and psychologic symptoms experienced. A quantitative approach to this study allows for a broader studying, involving a greater number of participants, which enhances the ability to generalize, as compared to a qualitative approach. Additionally, using a quantitative approach, personal bias can be avoided as the research will have no contact with participants, as the graduate students that will be employed are unknown to the researcher.

Participants

Participants (250) will be solicited from the graduate student population of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) throughout the United States. All participants will meet two eligibility criteria to participate in the study: (a) a full time graduate student enrolled in a minimum 9 credit hours with exception of graduate students competing internship or dissertation, and (b) self-identifies as a student of color.

Data Collection

Several options will be utilized for data collection to ensure maximum number of participants. First, listservs will be utilized to reach graduate students and faculty members that can forward the survey to their students. Secondly, online social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter will be utilized to reach the general population. Additionally, national and local chapters of Minority Graduate and Professional Students Associations will be contacted to determine if they would be willing to forward a link to the survey to their members.

A computerized version of the research packet will be developed on Qualtrics. The link to this site which will contained the survey will be imbedded into documents used to solicit participants. The documents will contain information about the researcher, as well as the request for participation letter that will include information of approval by the IRB for distribution. The request will also contain information about the study, and clearly identify the targeted participants. Follow up messages will be emailed via listserv and posted on social networking sites to remind or encourage students to complete and submit the survey.

Students who are interested in learning and or participate more about the study will be able to click on a link that redirects them to a website that contains the survey. Potential participants will be able to read the IRB approved information letter to determine if they are interested in completing the surveys. They will be able to indicate their consent to the surveys by clicking yes on the consent item, after which they will be redirected to the beginning of the surveys

Approval for all procedures and recruitment activities will be sought from the Auburn University Institutional Review Board (IRB). Once approval is received, a recruitment statement and link to the Qualtrics website containing the surveys for this research project, will be sent to listservs, online social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, in addition to national and local chapters of Minority Graduate and Professional Students Associations. Once participants select the survey link they will be presented with parameters of the study such as purpose, IRB approval information, length of survey and inclusion criteria (graduate students of color). Finally, a consent statement will be provided, informing participants that participation is voluntary, participants will consent to participating by “agreeing to take the survey.” Incentives will be a raffle of four $25 gift cards. At the end of the survey, participants who wish to enter the raffle will have the option of completing a separate entry for the $25 gift card. All personal information will be kept separate, so no identifying information can be linked back to the data.

Participants will be asked to complete the demographic questionnaire first (including the question institution type, PWI or HBCU), follow by the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure-Revised, the Sense of Belonging Instrument, Beck Depression Inventory II and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (See Appendix). Prior to distribution surveys will be taken by individuals not fitting inclusion criteria for the study (i.e. undergraduate student, field experts) to determine approximate length of time needed to complete. Based on feedback from pre-study survey participants it is estimated that the demographic questionnaire and four surveys will take each participants approximately 20 minutes to complete.

Instrumentation

Demographics Questionnaire

The Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure-Revised (MEIM-R)

The MEIM-R (Phinney & Ong, 2007) will be used to measure strength of ethnic identify among participants. The measure is brief instrument that assess affiliation with one’s ethnic group. The MEIM-R is a revised version of the MEIM (Phinney, 1996) and is designed to better reflect the two core factors of exploration and commitment believed to be integral to ethnic identity (Phinney & Ong, 2007). There are three items for each core factors, therefore the MEIM-R is a 6-item self-report scale, with two additional items used to obtain ethnic group related demographic information, for a total of 8-items. According to Phinney and Ong (2017) analysis of multiple data sets, conceptual analyses, and focus groups to refine MEIM wording and item selection, were conducted in order to develop the MEIM-R.

The reliability coefficients of the MEIM-R have been shown to be acceptable according to Phinney & Ong, (2007), as they reported .81 for the total scale, .76 for the Exploration subscale, and .78 for the Commitment subscale. Evidence supporting the validity of the scale was found using confirmatory factorial analysis and was reported to be, .96 for adjusted goodness of fit index, .98 for comparative fit index, and .04 root-mean-square error of approximation (Phinney & Ganeva, 2010). Items on the MEIM- R are answered using a 5-point response format with choices ranging from strongly agree (1) to strongly disagree (5). When research focuses on the overall strength of ethnic identity, as this current study will, Phinney and Ong (2007) suggest using the single overall score, which is calculated by taking the mean of the items. Higher scores indicate a stronger ethnic identity.

The MEIM-R has been available for many years and have been used with many different populations (Herrington, et al., 2016). The two-factor structure was supported in a study conducted by Yoon (2011) in which the measure was used with 298 counseling students. Similar support was found in Chakawa, Butler, and Shapiro (2015) with a sample of 105 African American and 91 European American adults from Alabama, with a large sample of East Asian adolescents in Canada (Homma, et al., 2014) and pregnant women in California (Brown et al., 2014).

Sense of Belonging Instrument

The instrument that will be used to assess graduate students of color perceived sense of belonging is a 27-item instrument that is divided into two separate assessment. The first assessment is the Sense of Belonging Instrument- Antecedent (SOBI-A) and the assessment is the Sense of Belonging Instrument- Psychological state (SOBI-P). The SOBI-A assesses the antecedents, which pertains to a person’s desire and ability to develop sense of belonging (Hagerty, et al., 1996). In addition, Hagerty et al. (1996) suggests that antecedents describe a person’s potential for shared characteristics. The SOBI-P, assesses Items, from the latter will be adopted to assess students psychological sense of belonging, however, for this study the items will be adopted to measure students psychological sense of school belonging. For example, item 10 would state “in general, I don’t feel a part of my campus community” instead of “In general‚ I don’t feel a part of the mainstream of society.”

Participants will respond by selecting an option from a four item Likert-style scale ranging from (1) strongly disagrees to (4) strongly agree. The developers used three subject groups to assess for internal consistency reliability and the assessment was reliable for all three groups. SOBI-A coefficient alphas were reports as follows: College students (.72), depressed patients (.63), and Catholic nuns (.76). SOBI-P results were .93, .93 and .91 respectively. The student subgroup was the only one used to for test-retest reliability with correlation of .66 for the SOBI-A and .84 for SOBI-P (Hagerty & Patusky, 1995, as cited in Hagerty et al., 1996). Three methods were used to examine construct validity and included (1) comparing items with other measures, (2) factor analysis, and (3) contrast groups. A comparison of means between sample groups revealed that the Catholic nuns scored higher on both scales, followed by college students (Hagerty et al., 1996). The Sense of Belonging Instrument has been used to assess the effects of belonging on various aspects of psychological functioning. For example, Choenarom, Williams, and Hagerty (2005) used the SOBI to assess the role of belonging and social support on depression. The assessment has been used with diverse populations.

The researchers used two subject groups to access for reliability of the survey; 500 outpatient clients and 120 college students, internal consistency results yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of .92 for the outpatient clients and .93 for the students (Beck et. al., 1996). A sub-sample of 26 outpatient client was administered the BDI-II a week after the first administration and test retest result yielded an average correlation of .93 (Beck, et. al., 1996). As it relates to validity, the BDI-II was compared to other depressive scaled and similarities were noted. The BDI-II was found to be highly correlated with Revised Hamilton Psychiatric Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD-R) .71, then the Revised Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HARS-R) .43 (Beck et. al., 1996). This supports discriminative validity for the BDI-II, as it measures depression and not anxiety.

A study conducted by Sashidharan, Pawlow, & Pettibone, (2012), compared the BDI-II to the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) to evaluate the possibility of ethnic bias within the BDI-II in a college student population. The results indicated that BDI-II provided a valid measure of depression for the sample African American college students examined as well as no significant difference found in the ability of the BDI-II versus the CES-D to measure depression when Caucasians and African Americans were compared (Sashidharan, Pawlow, & Pettibone,2012). As such, it is can be inferred that the originally proposed cut of scores by Beck et. al., (1996) in their standardization of the BDI-II can be applied to students of color.

Test-retest reliability coefficients for intervals ranging from 1 hour to 104 days, ranged from .31 to .86, with S-Anxiety scale having lower test-retest reliability that the T-trait scale (Spielberger, 1983). Additionally, the developer used two subgroups to provide evidence for the internal consistency and result yielded cobrach alpha coefficient .86 for high school students and .95 for military recruits (Spielberger, 1983). Content validity evidence was obtained through comparing other anxiety measures and result and the measure was found to correlate with the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale .73 and Cattell and Scheier's Anxiety Scale Questionnaire .85 Spielberger, 1983).

Data Analysis

This will be a quantitative study that utilized the SPSS computer program to run statistical analysis. Descriptive statistics will be used to calculate percentage of male and female participants, number of students per graduate program (Maters and Doctoral), and percentage of students from each type of university (PWIs and HBCUs). Analyses of Variance (ANOVA) will be performed to determine if there was a significant difference in sense of belonging in graduated students of color at HBCUs and PWIs. In addition, ANOVAs will be conducted to assess significant difference in sense of belonging and psychological symptoms experiences between graduate students of color from each type of school. Path analysis also will be used to determine if sense of belonging (mediator) is driving the relationship between students’ ethnic identify and their sense of belonging.

Path model: identification sense of belonging symptoms

References

Beck, A., Steer, R., & Brown, G. (1996). The Beck Depression Inventory – Second Edition Manual. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.

Freeman, T. M., Anderman, L. H., & Jenson, J. M. (2007). Sense of belonging in college freshman at the classroom and campus levels. Journal of Experimental Education, 75, 203–220.

Goodenow, C. (1993). The psychological sense of school membership among adolescents: Scale development and educational correlates. Psychology in the Schools, 30, 79–90.

Hagerty et al. (1992). Sense of belonging and indicators social and psychological functioning. Achieves of psychiatry nursing, 5(4), 235-244.

Hagerty, B. M., Williams, R. A., Coyne, J. C., & Early, M. R. (1996). Sense of belonging and indicators of social and psychological functioning. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 10, 235–244.

Hausmann, L. R., Schofield, J. W., & Woods, R. L. (2007). Sense of belonging as a predictor of intentions to persist among African American and White first-year college students. Research in Higher Education, 48, 803–839. doi:10.1007/s11162-007-9052-9

Hurtado, S., & Carter, D. F. (1997). Effects of college transition and perceptions of the campus racial climate on Latino college students’ sense of belonging. Sociology of Education, 70, 324–345.

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Museus, D.M., Yi, M., & Saeula, M. (2017). How culturally engaging campus environments influence sense of belonging in college: An examination of differences between white students and students of color. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000069

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Phinney, J. S. (1996). When we talk about American ethnic groups, what do we mean? American Psychologist, 51, 918–927.

Phinney, J. S.,& Alipuria, L. L. (1990). Ethnic identity in college students from four ethnic groups. Journal of Adolescence, 13, 171–183.

Phinney, J. S., & Ong, A. D. (2007). Conceptualization and measurement of ethnic identity: Current status and future directions. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 54, 237–281.

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Sashidharan, T., Pawlow, L. A., & Pettibone, J. C. (2012). An examination of racial bias in the Depression Inventory-II. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 18, 203–209.

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