Overview

The current COVID-19 outbreak created a unique, urgent, and time-limited context to examine intensified discrimination targeting racial-minority Chinese-heritage families in America, overlaying an enduring context of chronic and systemic racism. Using mixed-method and interdisciplinary approaches, we studied multiple forms of racial-ethnic discrimination and racism (Sinophobia) to understand their concurrent and subsequent impact on the identity development, mental health, and behavioral adjustment of 543 Chinese American parents and children.

We also assessed how experiences of racism and racial discrimination impact parents' socialization practices around issues of race-ethnicity and culture with their 4- to18-year-old children at the early stages of the outbreak (Spring 2021) and one year later (Spring 2022). Qualitative interviews were conducted with 80 parents to explore these issues in depth at two times.

In addition, we collected large-scale texts of COVID-19 social media (Twitter) posts from November 2019 to account for how public opinion, anxiety, and discriminatory attitudes evolved across the course of this epidemic and provide objective indicators of the larger public social discourse climate.

Intellectual Merit

This innovative interdisciplinary study significantly advanced our understanding of risk and resilience in response to social stress from an anthropogenic event among parentings and their children. Specifically, our findings revealed key developmental and social processes in the identity formation and resilience of parents and children under conditions of an acute but prolonged social identity threat resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak.

We found that racial-ethnic discrimination and racism, regardless of whether these experiences were in-person or online, directly received or witnessed, were associated with both parents' and children's poorer mental health. Parents' experiences with racism were correlated with children's mental health difficulties, indicating family system processes. Also, the negative impact of these experiences was stronger and more pervasive further along in the pandemic, highlighting the cumulative harm of racism. Parents were more likely to engage in socialization practices around race-ethnicity and culture when they experienced racial discrimination, and these practices can protect children from the negative effects of racism by strengthening their ethnic-racial identity. More positive racial-ethnic identity and perceptions that one's ethnic-racial and American identity harmoniously coexist in integrated ways were forms of resilience for both parents and children.

The use of surveys and interviews to assess different forms of discriminatory experiences, dimensions of racial identity, and racial socialization practices contributed to our deeper understanding of developmental specificity. We revealed new socialization practices that parents engaged in to protect their children from discrimination, which contributed to our understanding of parenting processes. Moreover, the qualitative approach uncovered how Chinese American families developed resilience via civic and political engagement to counteract social injustice. We also revealed the challenges that Chinese American parents and children faced across different stages of the pandemic, complexities in the ways that parents supported their children, and their ideas for how schools could address anti-Asian discrimination based on their lived experiences. 

Using the Twitter data, we developed a new text analysis technique that employs the latest transformer-based language model to assess public sentiments/opinions/attitudes on social media. Specifically, we trained a set of GPT models on several COVID-19 tweet corpora. We then used prompt-based queries to probe these models to reveal insights into the opinions of social media users. We demonstrated how this approach can be used to produce results that resemble polling the public on diverse social, political and public health issues.

Broader Impacts

Although rare, infectious diseases will continue to emerge and re-emerge globally, and their negative impact on psychological health is understudied but highly significant, especially for minoritized groups linked to the disease through social group categorization. This study significantly contributed to our ability to identity risk and resilience processes in families under conditions of an acute but prolonged social threat. Our project provided graduate and undergraduate students, particularly students from underrepresented backgrounds, with unique opportunities for scientific training and skill development to conduct culturally sensitive work with racial-ethnic minority families using multi-method and interdisciplinary approaches that addressed an urgent real-world issue with immediate impact. We also developed greatly needed educational resources on how to address the effects of acute event-based racism targeted towards families from marginalized groups. Knowledge from this grant was disseminated to parents, educators, health care providers, and policy makers to provide services and implement policies that promote well-being in marginalized groups and the larger public during COVID-19. These efforts can also inform dissemination for future similar events. For example, our paper was cited extensively in the written testimony from the Asian American Psychological Association before the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing on Discrimination and Violence against Asian Americans in March 2021. Our findings were also cited in the 2021 U.S. Surgeon General Advisory Report (Protecting Youth Mental Health) as evidence for the higher risk of mental health challenges due to COVID-19-related hate and harassment experienced by Asian Americans.

Last Modified: 08/11/2022
Modified by: Charissa S Cheah