Reflections of a black woman practitioner-researcher

Poetry as a tool for research reflectivity is used in this article to explore the individual and personal experience of a black woman researcher-practitioner, working and studying in two white male-dominated organisations—the British Prison Service and a university institution. The discussion will trace how she reconciled her multiple identities and how these identities shaped her perception of her gender-racial group, prison culture, and university culture. An interpretive creative poem that reflects the author’s attempt at capturing the essence of her experience as a prison service employee is presented. The author then examines an excerpt from her journal alongside an in-depth qualitative interview extract and discusses her interpretive comments. The article discusses the issues related to the author’s outsider-within position, a result of her gender and racial minority status, and highlights how poetry allowed her to articulate the anxiety and tension caused by her multiple identities.     

Stereotypical attitudes amongst black students at a rural historically black South African university

This study investigated stereotypical attitudes towards race amongst Black students (N=274) attending a historically Black South African university (females=62%; mean age of 22.15 years; SD=3.00 years). Data on group stereotyping by race were collected using a semi-structured questionnaire. The data were analysed for themes using discourse analysis. The findings indicated that Black students from a rural background stereotyped those from urban centres as lacking in African culture and being overly westernised. Conversely, rural Blacks from urban settings stereotyped those from rural areas as respectful, cultured and materially poor. Regardless of geographical origin, the Black students perceived English-speaking Whites as competent and friendly, while Afrikaans-speaking Whites were stereotyped as racist, aggressive and hardworking. The Black students perceived Indian South Africans as unethical and deceitful whilst Coloureds were noted to lack culture and to be aggressive. Findings suggest stereotypical racist language or discourse to be persistent among a student population with historical disadvantage.     

Successful rural black adolescents: a psychosocial profile

The purpose of this study was to investigate important psychosocial variables associated with the educational development of black adolescents in a southern rural environment. The study explored factors related to academic and social success among rural black adolescents. The focus of the investigation was on identifying psychological and social variables which may successfully influence the transaction between black youth and the rural educational system. Such success variables are important for research because of the traditional emphasis in the social sciences on concepts of deficit in the person-environment interactions of black youth. This article presents a profile of successful black adolescents in a rural school system in the Southeast. The profile was developed from personal interviews with 68 black students identified by teachers as successful, often despite social or economic hardship. The implications for future research and rural educational policy and program from the profile are discussed.     

Mental disorder as a black box essentialist concept.

This is a reply to commentaries on the target article (J. C. Wakefield, 1999) on the evolutionary foundations of the concept of mental disorder in defense of the harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) of disorder. The author argues that the HDA is adequate to explain disorder and nondisorder judgments and is not disconfirmed by any of the claimed counterexamples put forward by the commentators; the commentators' proposed alternatives to the HDA are inadequate to explain disorder and nondisorder judgments; and the concept of natural function is a factual, scientific concept, contrary to K. W. M. Fulford's (1999) claim that it is inherently evaluative. The foundations of the HDA are clarified by providing a black box essentialist analysis (H. Putnam, 1975; J. C. Wakefield, 1997, in press) of the concept of natural function that underlies the concept of disorder.     

Handedness incidence in a population of black university students

A modified version of the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory was used to assess degrees of left-, mixed-, and right-handedness in USA and Caribbean black university students. The distributional pattern of handedness in men and women was significantly different, largely due to a higher incidence of left- and mixed-handed men. Sinistral incidence in men of this population was significantly higher than that reported in some other studies on Anglo-Saxon populations.     

The black male urban barbershop as a sex-role socialization setting

Two hundred-eighty participants-as-observer hours and eight hours of informal interviewers with “informants” during a two-month period in summer 1983 were data sources in an analysis of a Black male urban barbershop in a midwestern city. The study focused on the barbershop as a sex-role socialization setting in which adult Black males actively negotiate masculinity while Black male youth passively negotiate masculinity and in all likelihood are socialized to become active negotiators. Content analyses of taped barbershop sessions and the researcher's written reports of the session revealed that the barbershop studied perpetuates sex-role stereotypes, encourages sexist attitudes toward women, and, in general, is a sex-role socialization setting that promotes sex-role inequality.     

Why Barack Obama is black: a cognitive account of hypodescent

We propose that hypodescent-the assignment of mixed-race individuals to a minority group-is an emergent feature of basic cognitive processes of learning and categorization. According to attention theory, minority groups are learned by attending to the features that distinguish them from previously learned majority groups. Selective attention creates a strong association between minority groups and their distinctive features, producing a tendency to see individuals who possess a mixture of majority- and minority-group traits as minority-group members. Two experiments on face categorization, using both naturally occurring and manipulated minority groups, support this view, suggesting that hypodescent need not be the product of racist or political motivations, but can be sufficiently explained by an individual's learning history.     

Collaborating for social change: the black psychologist and the black community

Several prominent Black scholars have argued that the predicament of Black intellectuals is inseparable from that of Black communities (C. West, 1994), and that Black psychologists should be at the forefront in developing culturally relevant psychological interventions (J. A. Baldwin, 1989). Yet, for Black psychologists there are a number of challenges to conducting successful interventions in Black communities, including historical abuses of Black communities by the helping professions and divergences in values, goals, and behaviors of professionals as compared to community members. In order for community psychologists to design interventions that are respectful of the cultural traditions and norms of Black communities, these obstacles to collaboration need to be addressed. This paper outlines some of the challenges faced by Black community psychologists, as well as the unique strengths they can mobilize when collaborating on research and interventions in Black communities. The paper also addresses methods of empowering Black communities and improving the training of community psychologists.     

Contrast and contradiction: Being a black adolescent in contemporary South Africa

This study aimed to gain in-depth understanding of the lived identity of black African adolescents in a contemporary South African setting. A purposive sample of 59 adolescents (females = 47%; Sesotho = 46%, Setswana = 36%, Other = 18%) from the Motheo district of the Free State, South Africa, participated in focus group discussions and in-depth individual interviews. Thematic analysis suggested that black South African adolescents experience transitional identities characterised by contrasts and contradictions. Altruism, autonomy, religiosity and cultural experiences were important to their lived identities. The interplay between African rituals, Christian principles, Western values and the globalisation of cultures provided fertile ground for developing a nuanced and multi-dimensional identity as an adolescent living in contemporary South Africa.     

Opening the black box: Presenting a model for evaluating organizational-level interventions

Organizational-level occupational health interventions are often recommended when improvements in working conditions, employee health, and well-being are sought within organizations. Research has revealed that these interventions result in inconsistent effects despite being based on theoretical frameworks. This inconsistency indicates that intervention studies need to be designed to examine directly how and why such interventions bring about change and why they sometimes fail. We argue that intervention studies should include a process evaluation that includes a close examination of the psychological and organizational mechanisms that hinder and facilitate desired intervention outcomes. By drawing on existing intervention literature we present an evidence-based model containing three levels of elements that appear to be crucial in process evaluation. We describe how this model may be applied and developed in future research to identify better the mechanisms that link intervention processes to intervention outcomes.     

Other race recognition: a comparison of black American and African subjects

The ability of black American and black African men to recognize previously seen white male faces was assessed. Relationships between recognition, performance scores and quality of interracial experience were also examined. Black American participants (n = 10) performed significantly better and made fewer false responses than the Nigerian participants (n = 10). Significant positive relationships were found between performance scores and interracial experience. Differential use of cues for discriminating white male faces by both groups was also found.