(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON, DC, December 13, 2012 — Three University of Kentucky (UK) sociologists have co-authored a study that helps to fill a gap in our understanding of suicide risk among African-American women.
Appearing in the December issue of Social Psychology Quarterly (SPQ), the study, "Too Much of a Good Thing? Psychosocial Resources, Gendered Racism, and Suicidal Ideation among Low Socioeconomic Status African American Women," examines the relationship between racial and gender discrimination and suicidal ideation, or thinking about and desiring to commit suicide. The co-authors of the study include assistant professor Brea L. Perry, associate professor Carrie B. Oser, and Ph.D. candidate Erin L. Pullen, all from the UK Department of Sociology.
In basic terms, the study investigates risk and protective factors for mental health among African-American women with low socioeconomic status. The researchers found that women who have experienced more race and gender-based discrimination have a higher risk of suicidal ideation than women who have experienced less discrimination, which reinforces previous research on the positive correlation between discrimination and poor mental health.
However, the study goes even further to examine whether different psychosocial resources such as eudemonic well-being (sense of purpose in life), self-esteem, and active coping—that have traditionally been found to be protective of mental health among white Americans—can buffer the effects of racial and gender discrimination on suicidal ideation among low socioeconomic status African-American women.
Perry said that some of the findings were unexpected.
"We were somewhat surprised to find that moderate levels of eudemonic well-being, self-esteem, and active coping are protective, while very high and low levels are not," Perry said.
The SPQ study used data from 204 predominantly low-income African-American women, collected as part of the Black Women in the Study of Epidemics (B-WISE) project. The SPQ study has helped to fill a gap in knowledge about suicide risk among African-American women, which is important because recent research suggests that rates of suicide attempt are high in this group.
The UK researchers said they hope the SPQ study positively impacts students.
"I hope that this study can inform identification of African-American students who are at risk for suicidal ideation and point to some potential interventions for coping with discrimination," Perry said.
Perry believes the most important lesson learned from this study is that it is critical to examine culturally specific risks and protective processes in mental health.
"These findings demonstrate that it is not sufficient to simply study African-American women as one small part of an aggregated sample composed largely of whites," Perry said. "When we take that approach, we completely miss what is going on in smaller, underrepresented groups. We cannot assume that what is protective for white men, for example, is also protective for African-American women. There are specific historical and cultural circumstances and lived experiences that are unique to each racial and gender group, and these differentially shape factors that increase or decrease vulnerability and resilience."
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B-WISE is funded by the National Institutes on Drug Abuse and housed in the UK Center on Drug and Alcohol Research (CDAR). Oser is the Principal Investigator of the B-WISE project, Perry is a Co-Investigator, and Pullen is the Study Director.
About the American Sociological Association and Social Psychology Quarterly
The American Sociological Association, founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. Social Psychology Quarterly is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal of the ASA.
The research article described above is available by request for members of the media. For a copy of the full study, contact Daniel Fowler, ASA's Media Relations and Public Affairs Officer.
For more information about the study, members of the media can also contact Sarah Geegan, University of Kentucky, 859-257-5365 or sarah.geegan@uky.edu. END
PITTSBURGH—What is everyone looking at? It's a common question in social settings because the answer identifies something of interest, or helps delineate social groupings. Those insights someday will be essential for robots designed to interact with humans, so researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute have developed a method for detecting where people's gazes intersect.
The researchers tested the method using groups of people with head-mounted video cameras. By noting where their gazes converged in three-dimensional space, the researchers could determine ...
Their review is published online in the Springer publication, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
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This press release is available in German.
How many matter particles exist in nature? Particle physicists have been dealing with this question for a long time. The 12 matter particles contained in the standard model of particle physics? Or are there further particles with too high a mass to be produced by the experiments performed so far? These questions are now answered by researchers of KIT, CERN, and Humboldt University in the current issue of the Physical Review Letters. (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.241802)
Matter particles, also called fermions, are the elementary ...
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This press release is available in French.
Quebec City, December 13, 2012—A study published by Université Laval researchers and their colleagues from the Canadian Forest Service reveals that the genome of conifers such as spruce, pine, and fir has remained very much the same for over 100 million years. This remarkable genomic stability explains the resemblance between today's conifers and fossils dating back to the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Details of this finding are presented in a recent issue of the journal BMC Biology.
The team supervised by Professor ...
A University of Oklahoma-led study has demonstrated that ancient DNA can be used to understand ancient human microbiomes. The microbiomes from ancient people have broad reaching implications for understanding recent changes to human health, such as what good bacteria might have been lost as a result of our current abundant use of antibiotics and aseptic practices.
Cecil M. Lewis Jr., professor of anthropology in the OU College of Arts and Sciences and director of the OU Molecular Anthropology Laboratory, and Raul Tito, OU Research Associate, led the research study that ...
MAYWOOD, Il. - A survey has identified career burnout as a significant problem among neurologists who predominantly work with hospital inpatients.
Nearly 29 percent of these "neurohospitalists" said they had experienced burnout, and 45.8 percent said they were concerned about burnout but had not yet experienced it. (Burnout was defined as maintaining a schedule so burdensome as to limit the time a physician will or could spend as a neurohospitalist.)
Results were published in the December, 2012 issue of Neurology® Clinical Practice. Among the co-authors is Jose Biller, ...
VIDEO:
Scientists are using "virtual hearts " to better understand risk in real-world patients. Researcher Coeli Lopes, Ph.D., University of Rochester Medical Center, assistant professor at the Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute, describes...
Click here for more information.
A computer model of the heart wall predicted risk of irregular heart rhythms and sudden cardiac death in patients, paving the way for the use of more complex cardiac models to calculate the ...
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Low-wage workers, who make up a large and growing share of the U.S. workforce, are especially vulnerable to financial hits that can result from on-the-job injuries and illnesses, according to a policy brief released today by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS). The policy brief, "Mom's off Work 'Cause She Got Hurt: The Economic Impact of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses in the U.S.'s Growing Low-Wage Workforce," was released along with a white paper showing that such workplace injuries and ...
