Examining Needs and Opportunities for Supporting Students Who Experience Discrimination

TL;DR

This study explores college students' experiences with discrimination, identifying emotional impacts and coping strategies to inform the development of supportive technologies and interventions.

Contribution

It provides new insights into students' perceptions and coping mechanisms, guiding the design of targeted support tools for discrimination experiences.

Findings

Discrimination causes more distress when linked to academic or social struggles.

Students employ specific coping strategies that can inform intervention design.

Perceived discrimination triggers feelings of inefficacy and emotional distress.

Abstract

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.