EXPANDING A CULTURAL RESILIENCE MODEL TO UNDERSTAND PREDICTORS OF QUALITY OF LIFE OUTCOMES FOR BLACK WOMEN

This study aims to expand the literature on Black women and resilience by creating and testing a model that measures if three latent factors, cultural-specific coping assets, traditional assets, and risk factors, are predictors of quality of life outcomes, which are associated with higher levels of resilience. Black women (n = 216), over the age of 18, living in the United States of America were recruited to take an online survey consisting of assessments that measured risk factors (i.e., gendered racial microaggression, racism, sexism, and perceived stress) as well as traditional resilience assets (i.e., self-efficacy, social support, and education level), cultural-specific coping assets (collective coping, cognitive/emotional debriefing, spiritual coping, ritual coping), and quality of life (including the psychological domain, physical domain, environmental domain, and social domain). The measured variables then determined the latent factors for the proposed model. Structural equation modeling analysis was used to understand the predictive ability of the latent factors while accounting for measurement error. We expected to find evidence that higher use of coping strategies as determined by the Africultural Coping Systems Inventory will be a positive predictor of quality of life outcome, over and above the traditional factor. Additionally, regression analysis was run to understand the direct relationships between measured variables and the dependent variable. For the traditional variables, we expected to find evidence that self-efficacy would demonstrate the strongest predictive ability of quality of life outcomes. We also hypothesized that gendered-racial microaggressions would be more predictive of psychological outcomes than racism and sexism alone.Following a refitting of the model, relationships between the remaining latent factors, risk factors and traditional assets, and the dependent variable were statistically significant. The traditional assets latent factor significantly contributed to the prediction of quality of life, over and above the effects of risk factors. Due to poor model fit, the cultural factor was removed from the model. Additional regression analysis confirmed that self-efficacy, social support, racism, sexism, and collective coping play a role in quality of life outcomes. Notably, assessing for gendered-racial discrimination better accounted for psychological outcomes than racism and sexism separately. This study confirms that certain traditional assets, specifically social support and self-efficacy, known to facilitate the development of positive life outcomes and increased resilience, do in fact apply to Black women. Additionally, the latent risk factor’s inverse relationship with the model’s dependent variable demonstrated that higher stress levels caused by racism, sexism or intersectional discrimination does have a negative impact on the quality of life latent factor. Although the cultural latent factor was removed from the study’s proposed model, the study demonstrated high evidence of this population engaging in cultural-specific coping, especially when managing stress due to sexism, racism or gendered-racial microaggressions. Lastly, this study confirms that accounting for intersectional identities when conducting research on Black women can be more robust and explanatory than when focused on race or gender alone.