Thanks to some amazing anti-bullying campaigns in North America, most of us know that bullying can have some serious & harmful negative consequences for our mental health. But what if we told you that bullying can also affect adolescents at a cellular level?

For our third #MustReadMonday, we are very excited to highlight a recent paper by Dr. Adriana Aldana that’s all about how to measure youth anti-racism: Youth Anti-Racist Engagement: Conceptualization, Development, and Validation of an Anti-Racism Action Scale

Alongside the devastating impacts of COVID-19 on people’s lives and livelihoods, academia has had to adjust to a new world where in-person research may not be possible in the near future. Social media — where 45% of teenagers spend time “almost constantly” (Anderson & Jiang, 2018) — is a promising option for research with adolescents. However, this type of research presents special ethical considerations.

Just Because We Can, Doesn’t Mean We Should
On June 17th, a White PhD student tweeted that he had scraped 10,000 tweets containing the hashtag #BlackinIvory. This hashtag was originally created for Black scholars to share personal stories of racism and discrimination in academia. Within minutes, dozens of scholars commented to discourage the PhD student from conducting this research without obtaining consent. The PhD student deleted the post and apologized.

Here at SRA, we are passionate about staying up to date on the newest research being done within the field of adolescence. In pursuit of this goal, we have recently started a new initiative across our social media platforms, #MustReadMonday.  

I am sitting at home, and the students in my class are neatly positioned in 2x2 inch squares on a screen. Already this semester is different from our long summer days of doctoral student residency where we sat in our poorly ventilated seminar room, navigating a table of notebooks, printed research articles, and the occasional spilled coffee. Instead, we are in our homes and apartments interacting through a camera and a screen that resembles the opening of The Brady Bunch (a reference many of the younger doctoral students don’t even know).

Despite this new method of engagement, familiar and recurring feelings arise for these new students: imposter syndrome; wondering if the program made the right choice of “letting them in”; afraid that being a doctoral student will pull them away from their communities and widen the gap between their educational achievements and those of their family members. They worry about learning a new set of vocabulary which includes words like epistemology and critical discourse and everyone’s favorite word to say aloud, phenomenology.'

Elizabeth Weybright, Ph.D., Linda Caldwell, Ph.D., Erica Doering, M.S.