Building Muscles: Brief Racial Literacy Intervention RCT (Randomized Control Trial) Improves Adolescent Racial Coping Stress Reappraisal

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 12:40 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Racial Stress and Coping (Table 32)

Abstract

The negative effects of racial stress overtax the emotional, social, academic, and cognitive well-being of all students. Interventions to improve racial coping skills have been understudied. Using RECAST (Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal and Socialization Theory) theory, a brief racial literacy focused intervention was developed to increase two racial coping self-efficacy factors-racial encounter recasting and racial encounter resolving. High school students (n=1088) were randomly assigned to one of 3 interventions (RL-racial literacy basic; RL+-racial literacy plus; Black history video control group). Students in both treatment conditions showed significantly higher increases in recasting racial coping than students in the control condition. Implications for developing in-the-moment racial literacy interventions to improve adolescent racial coping are discussed.

Authors

• Howard C. Stevenson, University of Pennsylvania

• Sasha C. Mejia-Bradford, University of Pennsylvania

• Emily Aisenbrey, University of Pennsylvania