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The Mistreatment of Others: Discrimination Can Undermine University Identification, Student Health, and Engagement

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Abstract

Past research documents the extent that discrimination experiences and observations can undermine people’s health and performance. In addition to discrimination’s direct consequence for targets, discrimination implicates the morality of the larger community where it occurs. Perceptions of community morality could predict community identification that, in turn, could predict health and performance. To test this serial mediation hypothesis, 615 second- and third-year university undergraduates reported the frequency of discrimination observations and experiences. Students’ perceptions of the university community’s morality mediated the relationship between discrimination and the extent that they identified with the university. In turn, university identification mediated the relationship between university morality and students’ academic engagement and mental health. However, only university morality reliably mediated the relationship between discrimination and physical health. Discrimination can affect the health and engagement of all community members, even observers who are not part of the targeted group.

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Notes

  1. Researchers also contrast group morality with group warmth. To explore this possibility, we combined participants’ ratings of faculty, staff and students’ rudeness and exclusion as a measure of university warmth. When university warmth was included as a mediator, the model indices were slightly worse in comparison to models with university morality as the mediator. But given how closely these two items are to conceptions of relational justice as opposed to conceptions of warmth and friendliness, we did not include these results in the paper. These analyses are available from the authors upon request.

  2. Unfortunately, some participants stopped answering questions before a section that covered risky behaviors and the frequency of sexual assault. This means that the response rate for the general campus climate and academic engagement questions included at the beginning of the questionnaire is 28.2 %. When we include demographic questions in our analyses, the corresponding sample size decreases.

  3. We tested the indirect effects for all models with age, gender and ethnic background as covariates. Including these variables did not change the reported patterns. Older participants reported more academic engagement (β = .10, p < .0001), higher mental health (β = .10, p = .008), and lower physical health (β = −.08, p = .04) in comparison to younger participants. Female students reported lower mental health (β = .09, p = .02), lower physical health (β = .08, p = .05) and higher academic engagement (β = −.08, p = .05) in comparison to male students.

  4. The patterns remain the same if the models are limited to just student or just faculty interactions. These analyses are available from the authors upon request.

  5. We also tested models in which we included students’ ethnic background, their sexual orientation or their family income as an additional predictor or possible moderator of the impact of discrimination experiences on the three outcomes. The patterns that we report remained the same. The patterns also remained the same if we included students’ relative identification with their ethnicity, sexual orientation, or social class as a predictor.

  6. Because these models do not include discrimination experiences; it is not necessary to report robust estimates.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Stephanie McKee, Christopher Aberson, Michelle Jolly, Alvin Nguyen, John Kornfeld, Cyndie Morozumi, Sean Johnson, and Jean Wasp for their help. This survey was supported by a generous assessment grant from the CSU Academic and Student Success Programs and a summer stipend from the School of Social Sciences.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Sonoma State University, 1801 East Cotati Avenue, Rohnert Park, CA, 94928, USA

    Heather J. Smith

  2. Department of Psychology, Humboldt State University, 1 Harpst Street, Arcata, CA, 95521, USA

    Alexandria Jaurique & Desiree Ryan

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Correspondence to Heather J. Smith.

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Smith, H.J., Jaurique, A. & Ryan, D. The Mistreatment of Others: Discrimination Can Undermine University Identification, Student Health, and Engagement. Soc Just Res 29, 355–374 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-016-0274-x

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