Date of Award

12-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Degree Discipline

Clinical Adolescent Psychology

Abstract

Despite the frequency of racist events experienced by African Americans in institutional settings (Morris, 2014), institutional racism has been understudied (Arday, 2022; Utsey et al., 2002). Institutional racism is critical to assess as discriminatory policies and practices may foster toxic environments (Arday, 2022; Garcia et al., 2021). To manage stress from institutional racism, individuals may use maladaptive coping mechanisms, such as alcohol (Su et al., 2020). However, culturally salient coping methods, such as religious coping, may reduce alcohol use (Mekawi, 2021; Walker et al., 2018). The specific hypotheses for the current study were as follows: (1) higher levels of institutional racism, will be associated with higher levels of alcohol use; (2) each religious coping style, that is, deferring, self-directing, and collaborative, will individually moderate the association between institutional racism and alcohol use, resulting in decreased alcohol consumption. Depression was included as a covariate. Method: The sample consisted of 144 African American adults (male = 45.4%; female = 51.1%;no gender reported = 3.5%), with a mean age of 34.20. Results: Institutional racism was associated with increased alcohol consumption (p =

Keywords: institutional racism, religious coping, African Americans, alcohol use, community sample

Committee Chair/Advisor

Temilola Salami

Committee Member

Logan Yelderman

Committee Member

Stacie DeFreitas

Publisher

Prairie View A&M University

Rights

© 2021 Prairie View A & M University

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Date of Digitization

1/16/2025

Contributing Institution

John B Coleman Library

City of Publication

Prairie View

MIME Type

Application/PDF

Download

Available for download on Saturday, January 16, 2027

Share

COinS