Patterns of Coping in Racially Stressful Situations

Abstract

A total of 376 White and 156 Black volunteers responded to the Ways of Coping Questionnaire under standard instructions and under instructions to recall a racially stressful event. Significant situational and racial differences were found. Compared with Whites, Blacks engaged in significantly more problem-focused coping and its four components: accepting responsibility, confrontive coping, planfil problem solving, and seeking social support. Blacks also reported more emotion-focused coping and its four components: distancing, escape avoidance, positive reappraisal, and self-control. For both Whites and Blacks, racially stressful situations elicited more confrontive coping but less problem-focused and emotion-focused coping overall. Several interaction effects were also observed. The implications of the results for models of stress are discussed.

An Empirical Exploration of the Occupational Satisfaction of Counselor Educators: The Influence of Gender, Tenure Status, and Minority Status

“…Faculty members who are minorities encounter the same ethnicity-based stressors described in the general labor market (Contrada et al, 2000;Plummer & Slane, 1996). Occupational satisfaction in higher education seems especially associated with the climate experienced by minority faculty (Evans, 1998).…”

Psychological impacts of racism in a clinical versus normal sample of African American men

“…The consensus among these researchers is that the repertoire of coping behaviors employed by African Americans in response to their encounters with racism directly impacts their psychological and somatic health status. Coping strategies that buffer African Americans from the stressful effects of chronic exposure to racism are essential to healthy psychological and emotional functioning (Daly, Jennings, Beckett, & Leashore, 1995;Harrell, 1979;Plummer & Slane, 1996;Utsey et al, 2000). Effective coping strategies were found to incorporate cognitive flexibility in response to racist encounters (Clark, Anderson, Clark, & Williams, 1999).…”

“Don’t Ever Forget Now, You’re a Black Man in America”: Intersections of Race, Class and Gender In Encounters with the Police

“…Our findings suggest that the psychological significance of discrimination for the construction of Black racial identities deserves much more systematic study; in fact, within psychology racial identity has typically been measured and studied as entirely separate from experiences of discrimination, with approaches to "coping" with discrimination treated as distinct and external to identity (e.g., Grant et al 2000;Luzzo and McWhirter 2001;Plummer and Slane 1996;Sellers et al 1998). While this approach permits clear separation of an independent variable (identity) and a dependent variable (coping with discrimination), our data suggest that a neat separation of this kind, while possible and useful for many purposes, is artificial, particularly for Blacks, and presumably other people of color, for whom the expectation of discrimination is in fact often an element of racial identity.…”