Research Poster Archive
Click through the arrows on the left and right to examine posters from each year.
Fall 2018 – Spring 2019: Identity Centrality and Women in STEM
My senior thesis project focused on Identity Centrality and women in STEM. I created an intervention meant to increase women’s identity centrality and scientist identity centrality in a sample of women science majors at a small liberal arts college. The intervention increased women’s identity centrality, but only in 3rd year and 4th year women science majors. This research was presented at the 2020 SPSP Convention in New Orleans in February.
Fall 2016 – Spring 2019: Gender and Social Influence
Study 1: The Confidence Gap
I worked with Prof. Paul Zarnoth and two other students to study gender, confidence, and social influence. We found a “confidence gap” female participants when answering quantitative questions in mixed-sex pairs, which led to a disproportionate amount of social influence by the male participant in the dyad. We presented these findings in a poster session at the 97th Annual Western Psychological Association conference in Sacramento, California.
With a new research team, I was selected to continue to expand this research project in the coming year. We presented Study 1 this research at the annual Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Convention from March 1-3, 2018.
Study 2: Sexism and Gender Expression
My 2017-2018 research team with Prof. Paul Zarnoth examined the links between gender, gender expression, and sexism. This project was presented at WPCUR 2018 and SPSP 2019.
Study 3: Alleviating the Confidence Gap
We completed an intervention to reduce the confidence gap, and therefore the social influence gap, between men and women in pairs. The intervention encouraged women to bolster their confidence, and men to restrain their confidence. Our intervention worked, and the gap in confidence and in social influence between men and women was reduced. This research was presented at the annual 2020 SPSP Convention in New Orleans in February.
Ostracism and Stereotype Consistency
I worked in the SCIP Lab examining different facets of stereotyping and prejudice. I worked on project examining the relationship between social ostracism and stereotyping consistency during the 2018 Northwestern Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP)
Cultural Competency
My project was entitled Culture Is Practice: Comparing Cultural Competency in Counselors from Guam and the San Francisco Bay Area. I worked with Dr. Mark Barajas, assistant psychology professor. To measure cultural competency, we used three validated instruments: Sheu and Lent’s (2007) Multicultural Counseling Self-Efficacy Scale, which directly measured self-efficacy enacting culturally competent behaviors. A sample item from this measure is “[I] remain flexible and accepting in resolving cross-cultural strains or impasses” (Sheu & Lent, 2007, 33).” Then, we used the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) (Phinney, 1992), which measures how much a person relates to their own cultural identity, thus indirectly measuring cultural competency. Previous research (Bender, Negi, and Fowler, 2007) shows that interrogating one’s own cultural identity increases cultural competency and ability to interact with diverse individuals. An example item from the MEIM is “I have a clear sense of my ethnic background and what it means to me.” Next, we used the Colorblind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) (Neville et. al. 2000) constructed the CoBRAS to measure the extent to which an individual denies White privilege, institutional discrimination, and the pervasiveness of that systemic discrimination in society. A sample item from this instrument is “Racism may have been an important problem in the past, it is not an important problem today.” In order to measure cultural competency, we compiled all the measures into an online questionnaire distributed to our personal contacts in the Bay Area and in Guam through email. We had 20 participants from the Bay Area and 21 participants from Guam.
We predicted that Guam counselors would have higher MSCE scores than SF counselors, due to Guam’s diverse cultural background, which increased the likelihood. We predicted that the MCSE would be positively correlated with the MEIM and negatively correlated with the CoBRAS. In other words, being in touch with one’s culture would be related to culturally competent practice in therapy and reduce the likelihood of having Colorblind Racial Attitudes. Next, we hypothesized that Guam counselors would have higher MEIM scores than SF counselors and that the MEIM scores would be positively correlated with the MCSE and negatively correlated with the CoBRAS.
We predicted that Guam counselors would have lower CoBRAS scores than SF counselors. Again, because Guam is so culturally diverse, “colorblindness” would be less prevalent in Guam than in San Francisco. We predicted that CoBRAS would be negatively correlated with the MCSE and MEIM. Research reflects this idea as well. High colorblind racial attitudes in therapists was tied to having significantly lower levels of empathy (Burkard & Knox, 2004), which, in our research, would be reflected in lower scores on a direct cultural competency measure such as the MCSE. Surprisingly, we found that counselors from Guam had much higher CoBRAS scores than counselors from the Bay Area, which was the opposite of our hypothesis. We attributed this partly to the fact that CoBRAS was not validated in majority-minority communities such as Guam. We hope to expand our cross-cultural research into pacific island communities, or in the mainland, running similar comparisons in cultural competency between different groups, such as urban and rural populations in the states.
This report can be found on the Saint Mary’s College of California website here.
Elisa Rapadas 