The Superwoman Schema as a Cultural Narrative in the Lives of African-American Women Computer Science Majors

uh and so uh Dr Boney thank you so much uh for joining us um why don't you go ahead and and so so you're going to be uh so you're from Amazon games um so you're the user experience research and weed so we're going to let you introduce yourself um talk to us a little bit about what you're going to talk about and then I will flip this over to you and you can go ahead and share your presentation okay of course hello everyone my name is Dr Daya Bonet and I am a user experience researcher but most importantly and first and foremost I am a narrative personality psychologist um so today I'm going to be taking you uh through my body of work which is my uh dissertation study just talking to you about this it's a narrative personality exploratory study about cultural narratives um in computer science African-American computer science Majors um this work is very important to me because I am both a psychologist and a user experience researcher in Tech and a lot of my work likes to see how we can merge the fields to um engage and expand our learning so it's a multi-disciplinary study you'll see aspects of psychological scientific science but then you'll also see aspects of user research science as well excellent so I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing and I'm going to let you and let me know if you have any issues with that perfect I believe I am sharing give me one second and we can see it awesome okay thank you well let me move this to the side so I can see everyone okay perfect I am ready to get started excellent thank you thanks oh yes alrighty so again like I said my name is Dr Daya Bonet um and I am a narrative personality psychologist but also a user experience researcher so this body of work a narrative personality exploratory study the Superwoman schema has a cultural narrative in the lives of African-American women computer science Majors was actually my dissertation study and as I said it combines aspects of psychological science as well as user research science um so just to give some context I started my doctoral matriculation as alumna of the University of Miami with a degree in Psychology and criminology um so my original research entrance focused on criminal genetic personality correlates maladaptive School behaviors and perceive life chances because surprise surprise I aspired to be a criminal profiler watched away too many episodes of Criminal Minds CSI those things and I just knew I was going to be a criminal profiler so I went to school at Howard University in DC what better way to get into the government by going to school in the nation's capital um but however as introspection and reflection really became an integral part of my practice as a psychologist I realized that my research begins with me so I was actually introduced to narrative personality research by my van advisor Dr Winston Proctor and through um the imaginative literature membership in a narrative personality Health psychology collaborative research lab as well as the National Science Foundation broadening and participation research and identity and success research lab along with being a user experience research and Tech I really wanted my research to reflect the contribution that near the personality psychology can make to the understanding of the human personality by engaging in research that affords the opportunity to minimize the disproportionate rates in which African-American women are subjected to poor health and health outcomes by understanding these culturally specific mechanisms that guide interpretation of experiences to shape identity and related behaviors so these have implications not only on the study of human personality but how scientists every day should approach the study of African-American women and specifically African-American women and white male dominated spaces so I really like to thank everyone for joining me this afternoon and I would like to welcome you to my body of work so the central question here is like what do we mean when we say we know a person and this is kind of our whole our whole person approach to psychology so there are African-American women who have thrived in their education a professional achievements in computer science but the psychological experiences of these women are not well understood by Scholars within the field of science abroad and participation the majority of research studies on Computing Focus primarily on the experiences of race or gender separately and this approach does not sufficiently addressed or capture the unique intersectional experiences of African-American women in this educational context psychological theories that focus on race and gender identity jointly help to explain the meeting students obtain from their social group membership and understanding this is beneficial to research concerning both African-American and female students additionally African-American women disproportionately experience environmental stressors including institutional systematic and cultural oppression that have an impact on health Health Care statistics revealed that black women are disproportionately represented amongst Health Care patients for an array of unfavorable health conditions including cardiovascular disease obesity lupus adverse birth outcomes chronic stress and psychological conditions the affirmative aforementioned disproportionate health conditions is theorized to be affected by the ways in which black women cope with stress research also suggests that the Superwoman schema functions as a cognitive framework that guides African-American women in organizing and interpreting information and experiences and also goodbye to me many of black women stress management practices and behaviors as computer science Majors African-American women are more susceptible to environments that person American women computer science Majors employ the Superwoman schema as a cultural narrative to reinterpret these experiences as a buffer to the harmful reality this study integrates theoretical approaches from personality narrative identity and the Superwoman literatures which largely have been isolated from one another relatedly the former two perspectives have neglected a substantive focus on African-American women a group whose lived experiences are Complicated by the culture of living in a racialized society this Gap in the literature is supported by Conway and Plato Pierce 2000 who are personality psychologists which suggests that the research on the development of narrative identity would benefit from a broader consideration of the role of culture so a culturally specific approach to describe the ways African-American women interpret and cultivate meaning of their educational experiences will add to the available knowledge about mechanisms of narrative identity development and African-Americans and literature on the science of broadening and participation such knowledge will also be useful for future research educational program development and culturally specific efforts to promote Behavioral Health and minimize the this disproportionate rates at which African-American women are subjected to poorer health conditions and outcomes so the purpose of my work was to expand understanding across multiple knowledge bases as well as stimulate more culturally responsive discourse about broadening African-American women's participation and computer science by utilizing a very popular personality framework McAdams and Pals 2006 their whole person personality approach to describe a comprehensive view of Personality which includes cultural themes of narrative identity development and perceived stress in a small convenient sample of African-American women computer science majors this exploratory descriptive study is designed to advance the theoretical and methodological approaches used to study narrative identity development generally and specifically within African-American women additionally this study utilized the only quantitative measure of narrative identity to describe the awareness and created a culturally responsive facet of narrative identity by adding a cultural coherent subscale of the narrative identity awareness questionnaire so to kind of put that in layman's terms before my study there was only one quantitative measure of what narrative identity was um and that quantitative measure did not include a cultural facet in which we've learned that that's very important to the way African-American women shape their lives stories so with the help of my advisor actually created my own quantitative measure to assess narrative identity holistically as it pertains to African-American women so our theoretical framework um this study integrated three theoretical Frameworks the first was the theory of race self-complexity and it describes how the meaning of race as complexity to the self system and includes explanations of how the meaning of race can be processed narratively among individuals who live within the culture of a racialized society it integrated theories of narrative as well as personality and psychological significance of race theories the next Theory um that the study used was the McAdams and Pal's new Big Five if you're into personality this is kind of the Holy Grail of Personality research and it's a comprehensive system for classifying the basic rudimentary tenets of Personality it's comprised of five principles and three domains of personality to answer that question what do we mean when we say we know a person McDonald's and Pals describes these three domains as dispositional signature characteristic adaptations and life narrative and in this theoretical framework they Define personality as an individual's unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature expressed as a developing pattern of dispositional traits characteristic adaptations self-defining life narratives complexly and differentially situated in cultural and social context this definition of personality places an emphasis on the nature of self-defining Life narratives complexly and differentially situated and cultural and social context which positions the role of culture at the center of Life narratives and life narratives at the center of human personality to further support Mech Adams in past 2006 framework I also Incorporated narrative Theory so near approaches to understanding of human personality proposed that human beings interpret their lives as Progressive stories that establish identity influence behavior and integrate individuals into their social environments additionally Theory suggests that the life story construction is one of the foundational elements that promote self-understanding and that to understand identity and identity development is to understand how individuals create narratives of the self from their personal experiences revisit these stories internally and share them with others while applying them to the knowledge of the self others and the world so lastly the Superwoman schema is an evolutionary social adaptation for survival to counter the effects of racism and sexism dating back to the pre-entebellum period and it has become a central component of the identity of black women research suggests that the Superwoman schema I byproduct of black women's combined experiences of racism and sexism guys many of black women stress management practices behaviors and includes both avoidant and high effort coping delayed minimal self-care and various other maladaptive behaviors that can lead to premature Decline and physical and psychological health consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of the theory of race self-complexity the study integrates personality narrative identity and the Superwoman schema theories this theoretical joining is one that I believe would really enrich the opportunities to study um simultaneously it informed the further expansion of multiple fields of study within and outside of the field of psychology so here we're looking to be able to touch Health psychology you're looking able to be able to detect we're looking to be able to touch educational research um as well as that big emphasis on the National Science Foundation and how they work to broaden participation in stem fields so now we're going to get into a quick summary of the literature so that we can really get into what we found um so first I want to give everybody a little bit of an understanding of what narrative identity is and the person as an autobiographical author I said narrative identity a million times I'm sure people are like what is narrative identity so narrative identity is the internal lies and evolving Narrative of the self that incorporates the reconstructed past and the imagined future into a more or less coherent whole this provides a person's life with a degree of unity purpose and meaning consistent with Erickson 1958 who is a developmental psychologist and identity psychologist the um consistent with his developmental model of identity and emerging adulthood individuals become autobiographical authors in an effort to create stable self-identity that provides themselves with a sense of temporal continuity and a deep meaning which is a way of being layered over the self as a motivational agent this creates a life story that is unique to the individual and interpretations of past experiences are filtered through these images metaphors ideologies and narratives that culture provides in essence human personality is an evolving integration of an individual's characteristic variation on the evolved design for human nature characterized by psychological individuality and which life stories are layered over Salient goals and values that are layered over dispositional traits over developmental time through culture so how does this play into well-being well the process of arranging life experiences into a meaningful near to form is a dynamic mechanism of psychological functioning um McLean at all to 2020 examined the association of this empirical structure of Life narratives with her donut well-being and health and they found that more positive or Redemptive narratives are associated with more positive well-being and that more negative narratives are associated with more negative well-being there's also a significant body of research linking Nearness of Redemptive meanings from suffering and adversity to higher levels of psychological well-being generativity and other indices of successful adaptation to life however it really is important here to consider the social context of formulating a meaningful story as it relates to African-American women within a racialized society forming Redemptive meetings are often at the cost of exacerbating personal resources to engage in strength behaviors associated with these culturally prescribed descriptions of successful adaptation to life this is also supported by McLean adults 2020 finding that the structure factor for stressful events were related to higher levels of distress additionally Studies have shown that coherent accounts of past experiences are associated with higher levels of psychological well-being but that coherence can also be related to poor well-being in the context of traumatic events like racism these findings suggest that there are moderators of the relationship between narrative and well-being so when do we develop this narrative identity so not surprisingly there was a shift in the narrative literature which originally posited that the emergence of Life narratives happens in emerging adulthood which was in line with Erickson's psychosocial developmental stages however McAdams habermas and blood along with many other personality theorists have met have made claims supported by empirical data that the life story emerges in adolescence so life stories draw on the stories that people learn as active participants in culture so that stories about adulthood adolescence um childhood and aging and parents facilitate autobiographical authorship through the stories that they share with their children about the culturally prescribed Ways to Live fundamental to the integration of experiences is the ability to form coherent accounts of these experiences across someone's life so habermas and buck introduced four aspects of life story coherence that's temporal coherence causal coherence thematic coherence and cultural coherence so temporal coherence is the ability to accurately perceive the order in which experience have occurred over the lifetime to date causal coherence is the perception that experiences are meaningfully associated and that events have causal connections with self-identity thematic coherence is the ability to draw out similarities between episodes and life and identify overarching themes that act as integrated interpretations of these events and cultural coherence is the integration of cultural norms about phases of the lifespan what is story about life should contain and what represents a significant event in one's narrative about the self and so here I'll make a note I said that there was only one quantitative measure of this narrative identity awareness and in this quantitative measure it measured temporal coherence causal coherence and thematic coherence now while cultural coherence has been defined by these researchers they did not add a measure of cultural coherence into that instrument which we oh was important because we see that culture shapes a big part of African Americans and African-American women's stories so we can't fully understand this narrative identity awareness holistically if we haven't factored in what that cultural coherence means to them so next we'll kind of get into the historical context of the superwomans so the Superwoman schema is a cognitive framework that guides African-American women in organizing and interpreting information and experiences and it's essential to the conceptualization of the self and so um this is rooted in the socio-cultural historical context of African-Americans women combined experiences of racism and sexism a growing amount of evidence has demonstrated links between disproportionate health conditions psychological stress and coping and the Superwoman literature it has gained attention for its reported function as a culturally specific schema that influences African-American women's experiences and reports of stress stress management practices and Behavioral Health one of the leading researchers in the Superwoman schema is Dr Wood scombay and she developed a conceptual framework that provides a comprehensive and multi-dimensional description of the cognitive effective and behavioral underpinnings of the strong one the strong black woman or Superwoman schema and so you'll see these kind of interchange sometimes it's related as the strong black woman schema and sometimes it's referred to as a superwoman schema so um these behavioral underpinnings of the Superwoman role they examined their relationship between stress and health and the study identifies five central themes of the Superwoman schema that was the obligation to manifest shrimp the obligation to suppress emotions resistance to being vulnerable or dependent determination to succeed despite limited resources and obligation to help others so African-American women report racial discrimination as particularly Salient and a chronic psychosocial stressor over the life course and Thomas edoll studied the role of culturally specific coping strategies on the relationship between gender racism and psychological distress of African-American women their study found that coping with stress via cognitive emotional debriefing such as avoidant thinking like the characteristics of the Superwoman schema proved to be ineffective in reducing stress Allen at all 2009 expanded this TMS model by considering the role of the Superwoman schema in relation to racial discrimination and allostatic load and found that four of the Superwoman schema subscales were significantly related to racial discrimination specifically the study revealed that the obligation to manifest strength and an obligation to suppress emotions were found to be protective whereas the determination to succeed despite limited resources and the obligation to help others exacerbated the independent health risk associated with experiencing racial discrimination lastly black and which is going by 2012 stress and strength hypothesis explains how both preventative and enhancing Health behaviors may be compromised by an exhaustion of personal resources through engaging in strength behaviors that characterize the central themes of the Superwoman's kids so now that we've kind of we know what narrative identity is we have a historical background of what the Superwoman schema is and how that relates to well-being and health we're going to talk a little bit about African-American women instead so deuteronimous and geronimous at all their weathering framework proposes that the social cultural historical context of African-American women's life experiences are situated within an accumulation of racial inequality political economic and social exclusion as well as discriminatory Health practices correll's 2011 study supports this finding in which they analyze multiple Pathways linking racism to health outcomes and found that repeated encounters with individual or institutionalized racism can elicit physiological reactions subconsciously in which this physical setting or social environment where reactions have occurred may also result in physiological Activation so basically what it is saying is that repeated encounters with racism illicit physiological responses that we don't realize so that's increased cortisol levels and free sweating increased heartbeat um psychological distress and institutional and individual forms of gender racism are more likely to be encoded as episodic memories sometimes consciously that can take the form of stressful events that elicit appraisal and coping processes operating through classical conditioning and we all know Pavlov and his dogs they heard the bell and they um salivated in the same way of a repeated encounter with gender racism at least it's a response which is normally a distressed physiological response my window at all 2011 also supports his aforementioned finding by suggesting that repeated exposure to racism requires African Americans to develop a chronic anticipatory state with consequential effects on the body's psychological response to Thirsty um threats so in this sense you're kind of anticipating that you're going to meet racism you're going to be encountered with gender racism and so the physiological response that fight or flight is already taken um has already taken uh place before you even get to a racist encounter because of the repeated exposure and that psychological response physiological response sorry looks like increased cortisol levels high blood pressure and compromised immune functioning research on women in stem documents that these challenges still persist compoundly due to the unique lived experiences of African-American women's interracialized society in which their social identities belong to two of society's most traditionally oppressed and underrepresented groups in stem educational settings people of color and women Malcolm Hall in Browns 1976 Hallmark study also coined a term what we call the double blind phenomenon which is simple to Double Jeopardy in which women of color navigate gendered racial barriers and stem education and career environments and these fines provide evidentiary support for a relationship between the nature of stem environments and health so now on to the juicy part of this and it's those research questions so to approach the understanding of African-American women computer science Majors psychological experiences that is culturally competent I asked two questions what is the nature of personality of African-American computer science Majors with varied patterns of Behavioral Health and what are the patterns of narrative identity awareness in terms of things of native coherence as well as this culturally specific narrative theme of the Superwoman's game and so to go back and kind of wrap these questions into everything that we've been talking about we want to answer the question what do we know when we say we know a person we want to look at African-American women computer science Majors from a whole person perspective as it relates to their narrative identity as it relates to their cultural identity and as it relates to their behavioral health so our research design and methodology um ask personality psychological science practitioners we find much value in utilizing person-centered approaches to understanding and describing human personality so a lot of times we employ what we call the case study design and it can be used to examine an individual life or group of human lives by either one exemplifying or displaying a priori conceptualization by two discovering new information by examining the Flesh and Blood of the socially constructed realities perceived in terms of the individual life rather than in terms of a predetermined abstraction or lastly by making comparisons of an individual's life with Theory of Personality multiple lives in a church for commonalities and differences and or different theories of personality so this study employed a collective comparison case study design to describe the similarities and differences between African-American women computer science Majors who share similar Life Experiences and we did this to highlight the strength and limitations of the current conceptual and theoretical Frameworks in accounting for The Unique lived experiences and perceived stress of African-American women in a racialized society my Collective case study design is also an attempt to extend this narrative identity literature to make logical inferences about the how the nomothetic truths about personality play out or sometimes don't in the lives of African-American women in computer science so because case study methodology likes to examine um the unique individual lives you don't need a very large sample so the sample for the study consisted of three African-American women college students between the ages of 18 and 31 years old the African-American women in Computer Sciences survey included demographic information in six measures so the first measure was the awareness of narrative identity questionnaire for African-American women and so just to wrap this back to what we've been saying there was only one quantitative measure to measure narrative identity and that was the narrative identity awareness questionnaire but as we've learned that cultural coherence and cultural prescriptions of Storytelling is very important and essential to the identity of African-American women so we adapted that original measure to then include a cultural component to assess that cultural adherent cultural coherence aspect of African-American women's narrative identity which ended up being the awareness of narrative identity questionnaire for African-American women it was used to describe the participants self-reported awareness of the presence of one's life stories about the self derived from past experiences and their perceived coherence it's a 26 item measure with five four item sub skills and one six item subscale which assesses general awareness temporal coherence causal coherence thematic coherence and cultural coherence of Life narratives it was adapted from hallford and Miller's 2016 awareness of narrative identity questionnaire and it's operationalized by the woods just gone by Superwoman schema questionnaire this scale was adapted using the following criteria so first I eliminated items that were not developmentally appropriate for college students who were in emerging adulthood I retained items that may be specific to the experiences of undergraduate women in computer science and I also retained items depicting more General Life Experiences versus specific experiences um McLean at all points out that the limitation of the field is a multitude of ways of capturing near the features with little attention to the overall dimensions of latent factors or narrative that are responsible for the associations of well-being and that quantitative measures of narrative identity will offer Clues regarding the relationship between these dimensions of narrative and well-being also without a quantitative measure and index we cannot look at large samples and multivariate Analysis in the future and additionally as I said this is the only quantitative measure of narrative identity and has only been used in two other studies outside of mine next we measured Behavioral Health with the perceived stress skill and that's a 14 item five point likert scale that is used to describe the global perceptions of stress and operates under the underlying principle that stressful events perceived as threatening or demanding can increase the risk of health problems we also use the big five inventory to modify to assess participants dispositional personality traits and it's the first domain of that mechanism past whole person framework next we use the general self-efficacy scale to describe McAdams and Powell's second domain of Personality which are the characteristic adaptations and that's a self-report of individual agreement and confidence and Performing effectively across tasks and situations and again the reason why we are using scales for each of the domains of mechanics and Pals is because we're trying to create a view of the whole person so McDonald's and Pals has um divided the whole person into three domains and we want to look at each of those domains as it relates to African-American women and computer science as it relates to African-American women and their cultural prescriptions of narratives as it relates to African-American women in computer science and their behavioral health and perceived stress lastly we looked at the science identity of African-American women and using the computer as science um identity scale it was adapted to describe participants computer science identity defined as the extent to which participants are oriented toward the role of computer science so this original scale is called the science identity scale um by Estrada at all 2011 and we adapted it and the way that we did that just changed the last word so in each of the items it has um I have a strong sense of belonging to the community of scientists and we just added I have a strong sense of belonging to the community of computer scientists lastly as I said um just gombay Superwoman schema questionnaire was used to describe participants identification with the Superwoman by asking participants um to indicate whether the statement was true or not about themselves if the statement was true participants were asked to identify identify if the statement bother them so example of one of the statements was I put pressure on myself to achieve a certain level of accomplishment and so they would either say that it's not true for me or this is true for me and they would say the rate at which it is true for me so rarely sometimes or all of the times and if they said that the statement was true for them then it would all they would be prompted to ask how much that statement bothers them so that's not at all somewhat or very much so my study was conducted using a web-based software called qualtrics and given to participants Nationwide I think one thing that is important to note here is that the amount of African-American women and computer science is very very low probably less than a thousand and this was around last year when I was conducting the study so this year it could have grown the rates fluctuate so with the National Science Foundation broadening of participation they've um fund stem at colleges to get more African-American students get more underrepresented students in stem education so the rates fluctuate sometimes our enrollment is higher sometimes our enrollment is lower and so when I conducted my study it was less than a thousand people in the entire United States that were African-American women and computer science so consistent with IRB protocol consent was obtained pride of participants completing their self-reported questionnaire um to recruit by participants I use Network contacts and myself as well as a principal investigator which was my advisor shared the link of the study of fire of your social media so use LinkedIn to recruit we use Twitter to recruit we use Facebook to recruit but it was like I said a convenient sample so upon clicking the study link participants were directed to informed consent and they had to read and electronically agree to their their participation being voluntary also as with all ethics and research they were free to leave the study at any time they did not need to finish the study if they said consent and they answered five questions and they were done they were free to leave um the participant must have chosen that they consent in order to let them move forward so if they did not choose that button they weren't going to be able to move forward with the study and if the participant did consent the next screen led to a demographics questionnaire um if the person did not identify as black or African-American or if they did not identify as a computer science major or minor they were skipped to the end of the study and we maintained confidentiality throughout this process and the names of participants were not identified on questionnaire so now we're getting into the results so of the six participants in this study only three completed the entire questionnaire two participants are traded after the demographic questionnaire and the remaining participant and treated after the dispositional trade measure so that just means that they exited after that um all participants were between the ages of 18 and 31 with the majority of participants ranging between the ages of 20 and 24 and classified as being in their junior year of college two of the participants were listed as computer science majors and one participant was listed as a computer science minor so what is the nature of personality of African-American computer science Majors with varied personalities of Behavioral Health so to describe this nature of African-American women computer science Majors with very positive Behavioral Health we use the big five inventory and their scores are shown so the inventory revealed that participants had high similarity and agreeableness and conscientiousness with the two domains being the highest scores of all participants participants dispositional scores are also consistent with their Superwoman scores and consistent with the Superwoman literature which states that agreeableness and conscientiousness are two domains that can be found in the latent meanings of the Superwoman narrative conscientiousness includes the descriptors of self-efficacy orderliness beautifullness achievements driving self-discipline and cautiousness and they aligned with the Superwoman themes of obligation to manifest strength resistance to being vulnerable or dependent and determination to succeed despite limited resources agreeableness which includes descriptors of trust morality altruism cooperation modesty and sympathy aligned with the Superwoman's themes of obligation to manifest strength and the obligation to help others when we looked at the nature of the personality of African-American computer science Majors with very Protestant Behavioral Health further we saw that participants had high similarity within their responsibility facet skills and with each participant scoring a four it's also consistent with a superwoman Theory and the Superwoman sub skills so responsibility includes descriptors that align with the Superwoman themes of determination to succeed despite limited resources obligation to manifest strength and obligation to help others participant scores on the domain scale negative emotionality and facet skills anxiety and depression were low similarity and of their lower scores and these scores also support the Superwoman literature that the Superwoman narrative has differential effects on the psychological experiences of African-American women highlighted by Alec at all in their TMS model and that suggests that the obligation to manifest Trends and the obligation to suppress emotions were found to be protective whereas the determination to succeed despite limited resources and the obligation to help others exacerbated that independent health risk associated with experience and racial discrimination to describe the patterns of narrative identity awareness in terms of themes of narrative coherence as well as the culturally specific narratives of the Superwoman the area awareness of narrative identity questionnaire for African-American women and the Superwoman questionnaire are shown so here you have the scores of both of those scales and the results reveal High similarity between participant scores on the Superwoman questionnaire with each participant having a high Superwoman score the Superwoman um Theory and participant scores on the big five inventory and the domain facet skills support this description sorry I don't know why that flipped so participants A and B have high similarity and narrative awareness scoring fairly low on that measure and participant C scored highest overall but their score is still relatively low these scores are also consistent with Eric since 1958 developmental model of identity and it says that an emerging adulthood individuals become autobiographical authors and an effort to create the stable self-identity these findings are also consistent with the significance of the study which exact which suggests that lower scores for all participants on the measure of narrative identity awareness illustrates how approaches to studying the unique lived experiences of African-American women must place the role of culture at the center of assessment additionally consistent with the case study methodology scores indicate how the Noma fitted truths of narrative identity sometimes don't play out when looking at the unique experiences of individual lives lastly these findings support generational differences in defining black Womanhood as participants A and B are Generation Z and participant C is a millennial and we'll discuss that later so I said earlier that I um combined aspects of psychological science as well as user research science and so here we'll see that combination which makes this a multi-disciplinary study so narrative personality psychologists and user experience researchers alike sometimes use quantitative data to tell a qualitative story so to describe a comprehensive view of the nature of Personality across McAdams and past three domains as well as these cultural themes and narrative identity development I have presented three Persona profiles personas are fictional characters that represent your target audience and that's something that is used heavily in the user experience research although it is not a real person it is based on real data and facts obtained through interviews surveys and other forms of research personas are used to build empathy with your target audience and in this case with my participants personify our data and create a comprehensive view of unique experiences of our population so here we're going to take a look at Super Walmart Persona a Superwoman Persona a is a motivated responsible student at first who perceives her life to be high stress as a member of Generation Z she is not fully yet aware of how her life story explains who she is but she is somewhat aware of how cultural shapes that story and we can see there with her narrative identity scores how that cultural um coherence piece is her higher score her dispositional traits align with a strong identification with the Superwoman schema and her social membership of both a superwoman and computer science May contribute to her higher sense of self-efficacy but also her moderate depression here we present Superwoman Persona B who is also a self-motivated responsible student but she also perceives her life to be high stressed as a member of Generation Z she is not fully aware of how her life explains her life story explains who she is but she is moderately aware of how both time and culture shape her story and you can see here how she has higher scores of temporal coherence as well as cultural coherence um she has a strong identification with both the Superwoman and computer scientist identity and that may contribute to her side her High self-efficacy but also May manifest as moderate to high depression and anxiety and that just goes back to how we were talking about how the Supreme schema has both um a deteriorative and protective mechanisms next we'll look at Persona C and Superwoman Persona C is our Millennial so Persona C is a self-motivated responsible student as a millennial woman who has had more time in emerging adulthood in adolescent she is more aware of how her narrative life reflects who she is and how culture shapes that story her strong identification with the Superwoman and her low identification with computer science May contribute a high self-efficacy and low feelings of depression however these competing identities may also contribute to her moderate anxiety and here it's really um important to look at the context of time so Generation Z and culture has been more empowered more empowered to do the things that make them happy more empowered to break barriers more empowered to be women in stem and so um in a time when Millennials were growing up it's probably it was a lot less empowerment for women to be in stem it was a lot less of do what feels right do what makes you happy break those ceilings and so here we'll see with Millennials there's a lot of conflict between who they are as computer scientists and who they are as women and so if we look at the commonalities among our Superwoman profiles we see that all personas had high perceived stress scores and that is really supported by the stress and strength hypothesis um for African-American women in a racialized society the formulation of Redemptive meanings are often at the cost of exacerbating personal resources to engage in these strength behaviors associated with the culturally prescribed descriptions of successful adaptation to life and its significance to the premises of my study that culture is the prescriptive element of the narrative structure of African-American women and that the nature of repeated engagement with environmental stressors is likely to have differential effects on stress and well-being so personas A and B have high perceived stress and high computer science identity which is supported by the deuteronomous and geronimous weathering framework as well as Pharrell at all's 2011 multiple Pathways linking racism to health outcomes and my window at all's 2011 findings about The Chronic anticipatory state of African-American women due to repeated encounters with individual or institutional racism in contrast a persona's a and b Persona C had higher narrative identity awareness scores and lower depression and anxiety this description supports a narrative identity emerging adulthood literature and positive and past 2007 model which suggests that narrative identity develops over time as individuals engage in storytelling about their personal experiences to and with others so as Persona C is older she has had more time to develop the abilities to engage in the complex process of becoming this autobiographical author additionally personality Persona sees lower depression and anxiety support McLean adults 2020 finding that more positive or addictive narratives are associated with more positive well-being and since she's had more time to develop these narratives then she's able to pick more positive and more Redemptive narratives from that full life story it's also supports the Superwoman literature that states that the schema can have both negative and positive consequences on psychological experiences and well-being so the Persona profiles were created to identify the specific domains in which contracts provided a particularly good or particularly poor understanding of individuals lives um so Harford and Miller's 2016 awareness of native identity questionnaire has typically shown High validity however the participants in this study scored relatively low on that measure but relatively high on the cultural coherence facet as well as high on the Superwoman questionnaire with three of the with two of the three participants scoring the highest on the cultural coherence facet we can infer two things the first is that hammock and McAdams and Powell's emphasis on how cultural narratives shape the personal the personal stories people ascribed to and reciprocally how personal stories sustain or transform culture seems to definitely apply to the description of narrative identity awareness and these three personas secondly due to the measures validity but low scoring in this study we see that this awareness of narrative identity questionnaire may not be the strongest way to assess narrative identity in the lives of African-American women with respect to case study literature we can make a logical inference about how the nomadthetic truth of narrative identity awareness does not seem to play out in the lives of African-American women when cultural when culture is not Central to the assessment while the Superwoman narrative has been a social cultural aspect of identity development for African-American women as I was saying earlier Generation Z has redefined the meaning of black Womanhood I know probably many of you on the call have seen them actively taking a stance against identifying with a superwoman and enduring what we call a soft life these generational differences in how black Womanhood is defined is likely to explain why the Generation Z participants had lower scores on the Superwoman questionnaire and the cultural coherence Fair facet of narrative identity overall and while the millennial participants scored highest on both the Superwoman questionnaire and the cultural coherence facet also in addition to emerging adulthood of narrative Theory research can suggest that stronger past perspectives are associated with stronger awareness of narrative identity which aligns with Persona see scoring higher overall on the narrative identity awareness questionnaire as a longer life has given her more time to formulate a past perspective and be aware of how that past perspective shapes your life's story so while generational attributes to lower scores on the Superwoman questionnaire have been discussed it is important to note that each participant still had a high Superwoman score so I stated earlier African-American women computer science majors are more susceptible to environments that do not consciously sorry are more susceptible to environments that present the challenges with the Superwoman's near the function and that is to reinterpret those experiences as a buffer to this harmful reality so it is likely that while younger participants do not consciously subscribe to the narrative this inhibitory nature of the self-memory system filters and interprets experiences through the narrative to promote goal-inducive behaviors that allow African-American women to perform and maintain educational settings this is in alignment with Harrell at all's 2011 study when Windows 2011 study and geronomous rathering framework um another important note is that each Generation Z participants scored moderate to high on anxiety depression and responsibility facets of the big five inventory however the millennial participants scored the lowest on the three of the three on the anxiety and depression facets and highest on responsibility there are multiple inferences that we can make here um so first these findings support the inference of the context of educational settings and computer science identity are susceptible to the conditions in which the Superwoman narrative is and psychological consequences are both positive and negative second alignment with Malcolm Hall and Brown's double-blind phenomenon in which women of color have to navigate gender racism and stem they are now part of various social groups that have competing identities so computer scientists which are seen as the white male dominated majority and African-American and women which are the marginalized minority so lastly these descriptions supported the theory that the Superwoman exerts differential effects on African-American women for most it serves as a protective function against multiple systems of Oppression invoking a sense of Pride and for others it contributes to a sense of powerfulness selflessness and self-silencing that leads to an array of psychological problems um so I'll quickly run to the limitations of this study so as I was saying earlier the low numbers of African-American women computer science Majors contributed to such a small sample size and it makes this a very Niche population and then online data collection during student in terms of final assessment so we took this while um students were taking midterms and finals which could be a high in time of stress um next we'll talk about future research and so we will want to test the validity and reliability of that quantitative measure that was created for the study we'd also like to employ the whole person Collective case study approach to pay the lives of a larger cohort so we definitely like to get that in and have larger groups um go through this study we like to compare and contrast um College age students to that of adult age or these people who are returning to college and analyze the quantitative data to examine their interrelationships between these variables lastly we would like to eventually compare and contrast unique unique lived experiences of women in the United States to that of women in Africa Africa has a huge population of computer science Majors um women in computer science so we really like to see how these differences in life experiences contribute to that identity and health and well-being and just to wrap up I know we're um close to time um in the conclusion you know we wanted to know what do we mean when we say we know African-American computer scientists and the answer is really we don't truly know but we have a better idea we have a better idea of how narrative normative how normative narrative identity development May differ in the lives of minority social groups how traditional personality theories and Erickson are the application of theory may not fix certain social ethnic groups how descriptions of strong identification with the Superwoman area to aligned with higher cultural narrative coherence how descriptions of higher agreeableness and conscientiousness align with high identification with the Superwoman narrative in our sample how high identification with superwoman narrative in the computer science identity showed higher anxiety and depression and the younger women in our sample and how African-American computer science personality profiles showed High perceived stress so lastly we can say that theorists and researchers should definitely employ approaches that focus on racial and gender identity jointly to understand the unique psychological experience of African-American women in a racialized society and as a narrative personality psychology and user experience researcher it is my hope that my research will act the current literature by connecting psychology health research and Tech to distribute to demonstrate how the merging of the fields of Industry plus social responsibility can add to the positive representations experiences equity and well-being of marginalized social groups thank you Dr Bono that was amazing and and such an impressive body of work um I'm impressed that you can even communicate all that in an hour I can imagine how long your dissertation took to deliver and how long it took for you to actually compile all of that information unfortunately it's one so we have we're not able to take any questions um but if anyone has any uh questions that they have for sure for Dr Bonnie please just send them in to us and we can forward them her direction or link you up with her I'm sure I I could imagine all the creative ways that this this information can be applied as we look at creating better safer environments uh for African women to succeed in stem and also in University so thank you so much for all the work that you've done and I'd love to share the slides so that it can be disseminated as well if people want to take a closer look thank you so much and I'm sorry everyone that we don't have time for uh questions um but if you please stay on the line because we have our next speaker