Alexander Floyd

Transcription

(music playing) Dr. Shalonda Kelly: I have two major areas of research, one can be given the broad roof of diversity because I'm very interested in racial, ethnic and cultural factors. Within that I think I have a couple of questions that are important to me. One is just understanding the various ways of looking at race and ethnicity and racial perspectives, particularly within people of color and particularly within African Americans. So I've done studies such as doing like factor analysis, looking for like underlying dimensions. If we measure race in all of these different kinds of ways, what do all of these various measures of race have in common? For African Americans one thing that I found have in common is an underlying pro-black or anti-black perspective, that all of these various ways of thinking about and measuring how African Americans look at race boil down to those two kinds of perspectives. What are the impacts? I'm a clinical psychologist so I want to know what does this mean in relationship to our mental health. And so, I've done studies showing that anti-black perspective like negative perspectives, which can include like having stereotypes of one's own group so that I may say or endorse items on questionnaires such as blacks are lazy, or these common negative stereotypes, that those things really are harmful for African Americans such that they are associated with poor individual adjustment, like increased distress, things like that. And also, they are associated with poor couple adjustment. In terms of my other major research focus, that would be couple relationships. I look at it in relationship to racial issues as well, so I study both of those things together and separately, so as I've stated before, I look at how racial perspectives are associated with couple relationships and as I say, like anti-black perspectives are harmful, but one thing that's been interesting to me is that pro-black perspectives have not been as helpful as I would hope. So that's one thing that I'm trying to study further, and using all of these various methods so observation, and questionnaires, focus groups, and things like that to really find, is there a way to get at what African American couples are doing well that may positively effect their relationships. The systems component of my thinking means that our environment matters in terms of families, communities, all of those kinds of things, and such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so I have to know a person's family, I have to know their context very well to know, you know ,what would help them, so I've done a lot towards helping other clinicians really work effectively with couples. I've also looked at attrition from treatment, in terms of what factors may leave, make couples want to leave treatment, and things like that, or initiate treatment, and things like that, so those are two broad areas, the racial and cultural factors, and I often try to study them together, but they both are very exciting to me in a number of ways. (music playing)