Project 4

Introduction:

Our purpose in this research is to find and examine the overall effects of being racially discriminated against and how often it occurs in our community and on the College of Coastal Georgia campus. With our Brunswick community currently dealing with the Ahmaud Arbery trial, we felt that it was necessary to research and gather data on this topic within our community and college campus. Our survey asks questions related to being racially discriminated against through the workplace, healthcare, and social media. We plan to use our conducted survey to gather data and examine that data to determine how our community and our fellow peers and classmates feel about being racially discriminated against and the effect it has on society. We aim to find that no matter the race, no one is discriminated against, but unfortunately, that probably won’t be the case as racial discrimination has become a growing problem in America as Brendesha M Tynes states in her article, “Online Racial Discrimination: A Growing Problem for Adolescents.”

Methods:

In order to gather our information on our topic, we conducted a 50-question survey that will take approximately 12 minutes to complete. We used a flyer to encourage participants to take our survey and this flyer was distributed to social media apps by every group member on a different day such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter for the community and D2L for the students of CCGA. Only the students of CCGA were allowed to participate and anyone in the community. Qualtrics also allowed for participants to remain anonymous and withdraw their consent if they wished to.

Demographics:

We had 99 participants from the College of Coastal Georgia and citizens from Brunswick and our surrounding communities complete our survey. Of those 99 participants, 46% of participants were College of Coastal Georgia students and 27% were not. The majority of participants were between ages 18-24 and were female.

Results:

Discussion:

At some point in your life, you may or may not have experienced racial discrimination on social media. One focus we researched was racial discrimination on social media. "African American adolescents and other adolescents of color experience both individual and vicarious online racial discrimination at high rates. These experiences are associated with adverse mental health outcomes such as depressive symptoms and anxiety over and above offline experiences [[21]]." as Brendesha M Tynes stated in her article, "Race-related Traumatic Events Online and Mental Health Among Adolescents of Color." In comparison to what Tynes found during her research that African American adolescents and other adolescents of color experience racial discrimination at higher rates, our data shows that most participants believe African Americans and both adults and adolescents are racially discriminated against more.

In another article that written by, Brendesha M. Tynes, Chad A. Rose, and Suzanne L. Markoe, they share that they used "an online survey of a sample of 217 African American and European American college students, this study explored online factors including intergroup interaction as well as online and offline factors associated with campus racial climate." and they found that "Despite the fact that more college student interaction now takes place online, researchers have yet to examine the role the Internet plays in perceptions of campus racial climate." However, during our research, we had 99 participants of all different races complete our survey and the majority of our participants were young, white women between ages 18-24 and we have found that participants stated they believe racial discrimination occurs more in both public schools and on social media.

When racial discrimination is brought up in healthcare, it is not really entertained much because you have to be able to prove it as such and many cant explain or show how they are treated a different way. Smedley D. Brian wrote a book on unequal treatment in healthcare and found that “In most cases, patients and providers are able to work together in an iterative process to match patients ’ needs with appropriate treatment, regardless of race or ethnicity. Discretion and ambiguity, however, create conditions in which race or ethnicity may become salient in the process of diagnosis and treatment in ways that make disparities more likely to occur,”.(128) In the case of racial discrimination, healthcare has its category in there also and is a very pressuring issue in today’s society. There are programs out to help minorities that feel they have been discriminated against in a healthcare setting or don't have the means because of racial discrimination to receive care. REACH is an organization set up nationwide to help African Americans and other minorities with health education and resources to live a healthy lifestyle.

Racial discrimination in the workplace is often seen as an issue that has been resolved because of the increasing diversity, so many people think that it's not much of an issue. The truth is that more diversity makes it more frequent for discrimination to happen because so many different cultures are clashing. In the article, “ Perceiving Discrimination on the Job” authors Hirsh and Lyons, discovered that when minorities mainly work with each other that co-workers are more sensitive towards saying something negative to each other (290). Both articles “Perceiving Discrimination on the Job” and “ A Workplace Divided: How Americans View Discrimination and Race on the Job” collected data where they found that African-Americans and Hispanics recognized more racial discrimination; while their white and Asian participants didn’t notice anything (288).

Limitations and Future Research:

Our limitations during our research were limited to the College of Coastal Georgia and the Brunswick community and surrounding communities. We have realized that our limitations were probably a little too broad, as our results had to be narrowed down, which in turn, we lost good data. Next time we will limit our participant criteria to only the Brunswick community and the College of Coastal Georgia. We also wish to expand our survey flyer to more places around the community in hopes to receive more participants of various ethnicities and ages.

Conclusion:

In conclusion to our research, we have found that about half of our participants have been racially discriminated against and the other half have not. With a Likert scaled question ranging from, never, sometimes, about half of the time, most of the time, and always, we have found that 20% of people out of 51, stated that they sometimes have racial discrimination occur in their community. According to that data, it shows that racial discrimination occurs pretty often in the community in which the participants lived.