Examining Needs and Opportunities for Supporting Students Who Experience Discrimination
This addresses the lack of support for students facing discrimination, offering insights for intervention design, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks without introducing new technologies.
The study tackled the problem of supporting college students who experience discrimination by conducting a need-finding study, finding that discrimination is more distressing when linked to academic/social struggles or beliefs of inefficacy, and identifying patterns of effective coping.
Perceived discrimination is common and consequential. Yet, little support is available to ease handling of these experiences. Addressing this gap, we report on a need-finding study to guide us in identifying relevant technologies and their requirements. Specifically, we examined unfolding experiences of perceived discrimination among college students and found factors to address in providing meaningful support. We used semi-structured retrospective interviews with 14 students to understand their perceptions, emotions, and coping in response to discriminatory behaviors within the prior ten-week period. These 14 students were among 90 who provided experience sampling reports of unfair treatment over the same ten-week period. We found that discrimination is more distressing if students face related academic and social struggles or when the incident triggers beliefs of inefficacy. We additionally identified patterns of effective coping. By grounding the findings in an extended stress processing framework, we offer a principled approach to intervention design, which we illustrate through incident-specific and proactive intervention paradigms.