Raising our Voices to the Concealment and Minimization of Racial Trauma: Experiences of Police Brutality, Colorism, Racial Gaslighting and Gun Violence
3 - (SYM 132) That Wasn't About Race!”: Preliminary Findings on the Construction and Initial Validation of the Racial Gaslighting Questionnaire (RGQ)
Associate Professor CCNY New York, New York, United States
Abstract Body Racial gaslighting is a secondary racial microaggression where individuals in power seek to obtain control over racially and ethnically minoritized individuals by denying, invalidating, or rejecting their experience of felt racism (Davis & Ernst, 2017; Johnson, Nadal, Sissoko & King, 2021). Existing sociological and theoretical work underscores racial gaslighting as a real and insidious phenomenon as well as an interpersonal process. Experiences of racial gaslighting and its impacts are understudied despite their purported association with negative mental health outcomes.This sequential, mixed-methods research study uses emergent themes and terminology from focus groups to construct and initially validate the Racial Gaslighting Questionnaire (RGQ; N=10). In a quantitative study (N=100), we conduct Exploratory Factor Analysis followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis (Kyriazos, 2018) and correlate scores on the RGQ with mental health outcomes (depression, anxiety, paranoia, self-doubt, and anger).We also explore: (1) internal reliability and convergent validity with the Racial and Ethnic Microaggression Scale (REMS), (2) verbal responses and themes in focus groups that highlight racial gaslighting as a secondary racial microaggression with negative mental health effects and (3) quantitative associations between racial gaslighting experiences and psychopathology. This research establishes an empirical basis for racial gaslighting and its mental health outcomes among 18-25 year old racially and ethnically minoritized emerging adults, who are in a developmentally sensitive period and may be especially vulnerable to the effects of racial gaslighting, which may impact emotion regulation abilities (O'Keefe, Wingate, Cole, Hollingsworth, & Tucker, 2015), substance use (Marks, Acuff, Withers, MacKillop, & Murphy, 2021) and self-image (Choi et al., 2021). Results will support the development of future empirical interventions seeking to alleviate the negative mental health outcomes of racial gaslighting while enhancing individual-level resiliency factors to aid in the adaptive processing and coping of racial gaslighting.
.png)
