2026 ASPIRE presentation

* Wonderful to be in this room with all of you. Welcome to the 2026 ASPIRE Fellows Presentations.
* This program really comes out of a very simple concept. The idea that in order for us to have policy thinkers, policy leaders, people who work in policy-adjacent fields, it is important to start the pipeline early. We do that at the Ford School through our undergraduate program, but we are always looking for ways to branch out, to get people involved in these conversations.
* sooner rather than later. So it's in that spirit that Professor Brian Jacobs and Robin Jacobs, hi Brian, came to me and said, we really want to think about a new concept for a pipeline program. And I said, I know a place that would be amazing for us to partner with, and that is Spelman College.
* A couple years later, we joined, we added Morehouse College to the mix, so we are so, so grateful for their presence and the amazing work that they've done. You're gonna hear an amazing set of presentations, and you're also going to hear, really, what's been a wonderful partnership between the Youth Policy Lab at the Ford School and the ASPIRE program. The Youth Policy Lab runs the ASPIRE program. They do the day-to-day work. They are looking at everything from cell phone policies in schools to childhood mental health to juvenile justice, you name it, Youth Policy Lab is involved in critical conversations.
* So, for each of the students that you're gonna hear today, they had a mentor that was a graduate student and a staffer at the Youth Policy Lab. They were able to take classes, and they were also able to not only learn about policy research, but be exposed to a variety of careers. They met with people about all kinds of fields, from running for office to, engagement with the mayor's office, to
* What does it mean to work in a foundation? And I know we have many of our folks who spoke to the students. If you did a presentation with the students, if you could raise your hand. I see a few people here who connected. Thank you so much, with the students to just talk about the work that they were doing. So, I truly want to thank Youth Policy Lab, I want to thank our visitors who worked so closely with the students.
* And I also want to give a very special thanks to Rhonda Stryker, who, is a supporter of this program, along with Suzanne Schenk and many others who have graciously agreed to support this great work that we're doing. So thank you so much, Rhonda, it's great to have you here.
* And without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to Carrie, so that we can get to these presentations. So, good luck, we're excited to hear from you, we are rooting for you, and we can't wait to hear about the great work that you did this summer. Carrie?
* Thank you very much, thank you for those words, and thank you to everyone who's here with us in the room today, and online. I know our… the students in the program invited their friends and their family to join, so hello to you out there, and to some of our speakers and folks who couldn't be with us.
* Including Robin Jacobs, who is not feeling well, and she's at home, so hello over there. She normally would say a few words, so thank everyone.
* But in particular, I also want to extend, further extend my thank you to everyone as the speakers, and to, our mentors who spent endless time, and to my colleagues at Youth Policy Lab, to Shiyu Nitsos, who handled the logistics to make sure everyone was where they needed to be on time, and knew all the facts, and the housing, and the travel, and…
* Really couldn't have done it without you, so thank you so very much.
* And to Sam Hallman, who's our new curriculum lead this year, she led all the students through the curriculum, through the workshops, helping them prepare their research, and to getting them ready for today. And I know I've seen a sneak preview, you're in for a great presentation from each and every one of them.
* So without further ado, I want to turn things over to our first speaker, Olivia Liddie.
* Good morning, everyone! OMG! Thank you so much for being here. Let's open this… Okay.
* Okay, awesome.
* Good morning again. Let me fix this. Hi, thank you so much for being here. Me and my colleagues have some wonderful research to share with you, so I hope you enjoy. My name is Olivia Liddy, and today I will be talking about the effects of student victimization on the prominence of school refusal behaviors.
* But…
* Before I get into that, I want you to meet me. So my name is Olivia Liddy, again. I'm a senior psychology major, Spanish minor on the pre-law track from PG County, Maryland, with aspirations to achieve my JD, Master's of Public Policy, post-grad, which you can see, in these cute little emojis I put on the screen.
* I also have, like, interests, research interests in education policy or youth development. I love everything focused on youth, and their mental health and things of that nature, which is why I chose my topic today.
* I will be throwing a lot of information at you today, so I have created this cute table of contents to help you kind of process. We're gonna start with some theoretical framing, we're gonna talk about my research question and my research methodology.
* We're gonna talk about my findings, and then we're gonna talk about discussion and some policy recommendations. Also, I did lose my voice yesterday, and I'm still trying to find it, so if you can't hear me at any point, just let me know.
* So, our students are failing. And they have been failing, and we've seen, we've been seeing, learning atrophy since around 2015. Scores have been on a decline. We've been seeing, lower reading proficiency and math proficiency.
* And we have been asking, what is causing this? Some people have, maybe talked about the COVID-19 pandemic, phone usage, social media, but in my opinion, I think mental health is at the center of what's causing our students to struggle.
* When students are experiencing bullying, or teasing, or discrimination, they're less likely to be involved. This is known as student victimization, which is just defined as any risk to student well-being. Again, bullying or unfair treatment.
* Students who feel unsafe participate participate less and have lower self-esteem. This looks like students becoming disengaged, and when students are disengaged, not only are they performing, at lower levels, but their teachers are noticing, and the teachers believe that they are less likely to achieve.
* We're also seeing that with pure victimization, we're having poor academic outcomes, and trouble coping as a result of coping with things that are happening in the classroom. If I'm being bullied, I might not be worried about studying for the test because I feel personally attacked.
* So, before I really went into, like, defining my research question, I conducted a literature review to really know what trends were happening in the data. One of the largest predictors of school attendance is school climate, meaning if I'm happy at school, if I feel supported, I'm likely to show up.
* Another interesting fact is that positive student-teacher relationships increase the likelihood of continued academic engagement. Furthermore, students who have a positive student-teacher relationship or feel closely connected to their students, I mean, to their teachers, are more likely to come to class and are less likely to drop out.
* Bullying has also made a resurgence post-COVID-19, with 1 out of 5 students reported being bullied. And students who are bullied are 2.1 times less… more likely to feel unsafe at school, with 20% of young students reporting that they have missed school as a result of being bullied.
* So, when we talk about absenteeism, by definition, it's just habitual absence from the classroom. So, our bullied students will be considered, or like, as… they would be considered someone who's participating in absenteeist behaviors.
* But when we talk about chronic absenteeism, we're looking at anyone who misses 10% or more of instruction time. This could look like 18 days here in Michigan, or more days or less days, depending on the length of your school year.
* But absenteeism is concerning because an absent student is vulnerable. An absent student is more likely to participate in, risky behaviors. This looks like violence, or this looks like substance abuse. We also see that absent students
* Are at risk for social isolation, anxiety, depression, suicidality, for example.
* And school refusal is a very unique type of absenteeism behavior. It's different from things like truancy or, like, not having access because of family or things of that nature.
* School refusal is unique because it is child-motivated as a result of anxiety, or dread, or fear. These fear avoidance behaviors, when I don't want to do something, I become afraid of it, and so I don't go.
* And regardless of the length of these behaviors, there are negative consequences. Again, social isolation, struggles with peer-to-peer connection, things of that nature.
* So, the risk of school refusal increases as the threats to student safety increase, or student victimization behaviors increase.
* So when I was thinking about this. all of this comes together to discuss my research question, like, what… how I framed my hypothesis going forward. And I was interested in understanding how student victimization, or the level of comfort of students, in the school affects their likelihood of school reluctance or avoidance behaviors. So I have two hypotheses, both very similar. I believe that there will be a positive relationship, meaning two things will increase at the same time.
* between student victimization and the rates of absenteeism. Additionally, that there would be a positive relationship between student victimization and the rates of tardiness as a result of school refusal or fear avoidance behaviors.
* So I'm gonna go into my variables. I have a few, but for my outcome, in order to measure school refusal or, any kind of, like, abnormal attendance behavior, I was gonna look at attendance variables. So I had two variables, recorded absences and recorded tardies, which were both self-reported, self-reported questions from the students. They answered questions like, how many times this semester were you absent or late? They responded on this ordinal scale, Likert scale.
* Either one, never, up to, 5, 10 times or more.
* Let me talk about my controls before I go forward. I also did two controls, generalized anxiety disorder. Because school refusal is a mental health thing, I wanted to look at anxiety, if they're definitely highly correlated, so I used 8, 8, question scale was a composite score from the G87, which is a well-known anxiety scale. Also academic engagement was a 5-question composite score. Students responded to questions like, do you study for tests? Do you try hard in class? And they answered, and they responded on a Likert scale.
* I had 5 predictor variables. My first 3 were meant to, kind of look at the social climate in schools, so I talked about student-teacher relationship, social comfort, and perceived safety. My student-teacher relationship was a… selected from a 9-item scale. It was a Likert scale as well. The students responded to questions like, I feel safe and comfortable with teachers in this school, and higher scores suggested stronger student-teacher relationships.
* In terms of social comfort, I actually split this into a dichotomous variable, meaning it was two parts, high and low. It was on a Likert scale as well. Students responded to questions like, how comfortable do you feel about discussing mental health with your friends?
* Higher scores, higher social comfort. In perceived safety, it was very similar. How safe do you feel in the bathroom? Students responded between not safe and very safe. Higher scores equal higher levels of safety, lower scores are low levels of safety, and these were also split into this high group and low group.
* I also had two, kind of adverse childhood experiences, that I wanted to point out, because we know that bullying and, feeling, like, ostracized is part of school refusal, so I chose these two specifically. They were also dichotomous variables, meaning students chose yes or no. Have you experienced bullying or discrimination?
* So within my methods and procedures, I ran four binary logistic regressions. You're like, Liv, why did you run four? I ran two sets of two. One, to compare students who had no absenteeism or no tardiness behaviors at all, to students who had some.
* So that could be between 1.5 to 10. Then, I did a second set of logistic regressions.
* that we're looking at students who had 4 or fewer experiences with absenteeism or tardies to students who had 5 or more. I chose this number because specifically here in Michigan, students begin receiving truancy warnings around 5 days, so anyone over 5 or more of these, like, weird abnormal
* Attendance behaviors most likely know that they're experiencing something that they're not supposed to be doing. So I think that's just interesting to look at. We had around 9,000 participants, ages ranged from 12 to 18, with a mean age of 15. So it was an older group.
* So, before we get into the results of my regression, I want you to kind of get a bit of an understanding of why, or how our students are moving. So, we see that a majority of our participants say that they were absent because they were sick, which is very interesting. Followed closely, not closely, but followed by feeling tired, having no way to school, and then feeling anxious. And we have less than a thousand students reporting that they have been absent because they felt unsafe, or because they were bullied.
* Our next slide is two pie charts that describe how, like, er… that describe how participants responded to the question, how many days were you absent? We see that a majority of students were absent between 1.5 and 4 days, with only 15% of students saying that they were absent no days. We had similar results in the number of days late.
* With 26% of students saying they were late 1.5 days, and 24% saying they were late 4 days.
* I think what's interesting here is that 20%, a little bit more than 20% of our students are saying that they are late for more than 10 days.
* So we'll go into my regression. As you can see by this wonderful chart, almost a majority of our predictor variables were predictive, except for discrimination, and academic engagement was approaching being statistically significant, but it was not.
* I think what's interesting here in our controls is we see that anxiety was statistically significant, with a 1.07 odds ratio, meaning with every increase in anxiety, we're also seeing an increase in days absent.
* Fun little fact. This is my logistic regression looking at students with zero absences to students with some kind of absence experience.
* If we go into more of the predictors, we see that students with stronger student-teacher relationships have a 1.64 ratio increase in days absent compared to those who did not have strong teacher relationships.
* Additionally, students with higher levels of social comfort had a 12% decrease in days absent, so the more socially comfortable you were, the less likely you are to be absent.
* We have two more sets of results here, that students who felt the safest were 38% more likely to be absent than students who reported feeling less safe.
* And bullied students were 40% more likely to miss school than non-bullied peers.
* So as we go into the tardies versus not tardies, we see similar results, but there are some differences. Social comfortability was not statistically significant, nor was discrimination or academic engagement similar to our absences.
* But, oh, generalized anxiety was also statistically significant, again, and it had similar rates as during absences.
* We see that students with stronger student-teacher relationships have a 1.43 ratio increase in late arrivals, meaning that with every increase in student-teacher closeness, we're seeing them be, have a more likelihood to be late to class.
* Additionally, students who felt the safest had a 30% more like… were 30% more likely to be late than students who felt less safe, and bullied students were 30% more likely to be late to class than non-bullied peers.
* So…
* What do these results suggest? I think it's clear that we know that social comfort, bullying, and anxiety are clear predictors for absence behaviors. Additionally, anxiety and bullying are clear predictors for tardiness.
* But now you're thinking, Olivia, you just told me that when you have strong teacher relationships, or when you feel unsafe, you're less likely to show up to class, or you're gonna be tardy. And I would agree with you, I say that that's what the previous literature has suggested to us. And I think that this was an example where in the data set, we might have come across some bias, which I'll discuss now.
* I think… oop.
* Excuse me.
* It's possible that we had some desirability bias here, and some self-selection bias. And so, for desirability, when we look at social desirability, we see that students sometimes don't want to report their actual absence behavior because they don't want to feel ashamed.
* or they don't want to be judged. This was an anonymous survey, but still, like, the human mind works in a specific way to avoid feeling this kind of discomfort. In terms of self-selection bias, students who are struggling with absenteeism or tardiness might not even be in the classroom to take a survey to talk about their absenteeism behaviors. So this is also
* Possibly affecting, our results and showing us these kind of, like, Confusing or contradicting results.
* Additionally, studies have found that when reporting abnormal absence behavior or attendance behavior, students across the board, in schools, at work, are likely to under-report their behaviors, unless they are sick, which is why I think it's interesting that we saw on that very first chart that students were very likely to report that they were absent because they were sick.
* But I do think it is clear
* that mental health, bullying, anxiety, social comfort are predictors for how students feel in the classroom and if they want to come. So, in order to
* change and promote student mental health, I think we should implement the school health assessment and performance evaluation, which is already implemented in some schools in the country, but should be implemented everywhere.
* And this is a free, auditing system that provides schools, participating schools, with a comprehensive strategic plan to improve the mental health of their students, and just generally their entire community.
* It exposes said schools to resources and social services to reach their goals and promote well-being.
* So, I just want to say thank you so much for listening to my research. If you want to read more, please read more. You can scan this QR code, I have my entire paper. You can hear more about my other two logistic regressions. I just want to say thank you to the University of Michigan for housing us, Youth Policy Lab, the Ford School, Samantha Hallman, Cherie Hammerman, Xiaonitsis.
* my, mentor, Michelle Garcia, YPL staff, my ASPIRE family, of course, my family at home, my sisters at home.
* And I just want to leave you with one quote.
* It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. Frederick Douglass. So thank you.
* I think we may have time for questions, but I'm not sure. Okay.
* So we'll ask everyone to…
* Oh my god.
* Is it a challenge?
* Does anyone have a question?
* Anyone?
* So, thank you so much for that presentation. So, two things. I'm still trying to grapple with…
* positive parent… I mean, positive teacher relationships.
* and the relationship to that, and higher, tardiness and absenteeism. I think that's really interesting and puzzling, I'm trying to understand that. And second, it was interesting, another, reason, and I know you didn't look at this, was lack of transportation or didn't have a way to school. And I know you didn't focus on that, but I just thought that was interesting in terms of one of the other
* Big reasons for why, students aren't showing up.
* So…
* when… I'm gonna address transportation first, because I just read an article about this, like, 2 days ago, and they said that, actually, in, like, black and brown communities, lack of transportation, reliable transportation, is one of the largest
* reasons for absenteeism behaviors. I think that's… it could be, like, a whole, another research topic about, like, how we can provide access for these students.
* But it is an incredible predictor.
* In terms of student-teacher relationships, if…
* If this, like, set of students are completely different from everyone across the country, which is possible, like, maybe it's possible that in these schools, the closer you are to your teachers, maybe they're giving you, access to more…
* like, conferences, or things of that nature, and you're not showing up to class. Like, there's possibilities that this is what happened, outside of bias.
* I was also thinking, like, maybe if you have closer student-teacher relationships, you just feel comfortable, that's your friend, so, like, you're showing up late to class. I don't know if that's, like, what's happening, but I do think it's interesting. I think it's just interesting when we look at this data set, like, why are these students different, and why are they showing these trends that are happening?
* So, thank you for your question.
* Yes.
* Thanks so much. Fantastic research. Thank you for providing it for us and sharing it with us. So, I'm thinking about… I've had two kiddos, in high school, and…
* One of the things that I've heard from friends, but then other students, also as a mental health care provider, is that high school students, particularly black and brown students, take care of their younger siblings when parents are at work, and elementary school starts later than high school.
* And so they have to get their siblings to school safely, and then they get themselves to school. And so I'm wondering if the… I have not seen the data set, so does the data set allow for any of that research to be done, and to look at that piece as well? Okay. I love this question.
* It's actually in my paper, too, if you want to read it. But, okay, so one of my…
* other limitations within this study was that R variables were frequency variables, or
* More specifically, I guess, it was a categorical variable that
* when we're looking at, like, absences and tardies, you can't see exactly why students were absent or tardy, which made it difficult because, especially when you're looking at… like, I see that you're late.
* And, if we go back, you can see that the highest, like, marking or level that students could respond to was 10 or more.
* But what does more mean? Like, if I have 18 absences, I can't put down that I have 18 absences, I just check that I have 18 or more. Or if I'm late 20 times a semester, I was only able to say that I was absent, or late 10 times or more. So, I would have loved to look at, why are you late, like…
* just because of the type of survey that it was, it was hard to get, like, real responses and, like, real reasons, but I do think it's interesting, and I was sitting there, like, with a data set, like, wait, why are you late? Why are you absent? So, but thank you for that question, and I definitely agree that, you know, that is something that's going on.
* Yes.
* Yes.
* Thank you for the amazing presentation. I believe in the presentation you said the students that had no absences or tardies felt the least safe, like, with their teachers in class. I was just wondering why, you thought that was.
* So I'm really not sure. Just because the literature does not suggest this, but I will say, and I was thinking this as I was talking about it, it's possible that when I feel unsafe in my school community, I might run to class. I might be there on time early, I want to be close to the teacher.
* I, you know, I want to be supported. If I'm being bullied, I'm probably not going to be bullied in the classroom, so maybe I'll be more on time. I think that's a possibility. I'm not sure. I'll have to check the literature, but…
* Yes. Thank you.
* Yay.
* That was… that was wonderful. Thank you so much for starting things off on such a strong note. I will now turn things over to Tony Fleming to, to lead us into the next presentation.
* Good morning.
* Good morning. Good morning, how are you?
* Good morning, everyone. Once again, my name is Tony Fleming. I am a rising senior, economics major, public health minor from Eufaula, Alabama.
* attending the Spelman College. And after Spelman, my plans are to get my MPH, with a focus on public policy… I mean, I'm sorry, a focus on health policy. And a lot of my research that I do is focused on maternal health, perinatal health, and youth development.
* But today, I will be presenting my research titled, Examining Gender Differences and the Impact of Parental Death on Adolescent Mental Health, Behavior, and Academic Outcomes.
* So…
* Before discussing the research itself, it's important to understand why this issue matters. Parental death is considered one of the most severe adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs.
* Which are traumatic events that occur during childhood and have long-term effects on health and development, and this is also an ACE myself that I have endured.
* Losing a parent during adolescence happens during one of the most critical periods of development, and teenagers are learning emotional regulation.
* Developing their identities, building relationships, and preparing for adulthood.
* And when that developmental process is interrupted by grief, the effects can extend well beyond sadness, and may influence mental health behavior and future opportunities.
* Grief doesn't just stay at home. It often also shows up at school. And schools are usually the first environment where changes become noticeable because students spend so much of their day there.
* Teachers may observe declining grades, you know, increased absences, emotional withdrawal, disruptive behavior, or changes in peer relationships before a student ever receives mental health services.
* Because schools often become the first point of contact.
* Educators have an opportunity to identify struggling students early and connect with them with appropriate support.
* That is why parental bereavement is not only a mental health issue, but I also believe it's an education and public health issue.
* So…
* Previous research has consistently shown that adolescents who lose a parent experience worse outcome than their peers. Studies have found increased rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, behavioral problems, and lower academic achievement among bereaved youth.
* However, one important gap still exists, and although some evidence suggests that girls tend to internalize grief through emotional distress, while boys may externalize grief through, like, behavioral problems.
* Relatively few studies have examined these differences using one large adolescent sample, and that gap is exactly what my research aims to address.
* So…
* This research has important implications beyond psychology to me, and schools interact with nearly every adolescent, every day, often before healthcare providers do.
* The findings also suggest that interventions should not necessarily be, like, you know, one size fits all, but understanding gender differences allows schools to provide more targeted support.
* And supporting grieving youth isn't simply about improving grades, it also promotes, like, healthier long-term development.
* So, this brings me to my research question. And my research question is.
* How does parental death affect mental health, behavioral health, and academic outcomes among female and male high school students, and how do bereavement responses differ by gender?
* So…
* I, based on existing literature, I, came up with two hypotheses, and my first one was that I expected adolescents who experience parental deaths to report higher depression, higher anxiety, and lower academic engagement, and more behavioral problems.
* My second one, I expected these bereavement responses to differ between girls and boys, with girls demonstrating more emotional symptoms and boys displaying more behavioral difficulties.
* So…
* The data set used was a student survey, and it included approximately 10,700 students from grades 9 through 12 in a large urban school district. Because the survey included thousands of adolescents, it provided enough statistical power to examine gender differences with greater confidence than many previous studies.
* And also, it is important to note that these data… that this data is cross-sectional, and it doesn't capture one point in time. I mean, it does capture one point in time, rather than over a long period of time.
* So…
* This slide shows the gender distribution of the sample. And approximately 53% of participants identified as girls, while about 44% identified as boys, and smaller percentages identified as, like, non-binary, prefer not to answer, or selected another gender identity.
* Because the majority of this sample consisted of girls and boys, my primary analysis focused on comparing those two groups.
* While acknowledging the presence of other gender identities in the overall data set.
* So… My measures used was the independent variable, which was whether students had experienced parental death.
* And that was, asked by using yes or no. Gender served as the moderator because I wanted to examine whether prevention affected boys and girls differently. And independent variables represented three important domains. Mental health outcomes included depression and anxiety.
* Academic outcomes included academic engagement using a validated UCCSR engagement composite, and so that was, like, that asked questions like.
* Do you study when you go home? Do you complete your homework? And things of that nature. And then also, behavior outcomes, which included school, trouble and skipping class. And together, these measures allow me to examine how bereavement affects multiple access
* Aspects of, adolescent functioning.
* So, this brings me to my statistical analysis, and I used several of them to answer my research question.
* The first one is a descriptive statistics to summarize the characteristics of my sample, and then next is a chi-square analysis, which examined whether parental death
* Differed across gender.
* Then I conducted a one-way ANOVA,
* comparing four groups. And that was girls with parental death, girls without parental death, boys with parental death, and boys without, parental death. And because ANOVAs only tell us that differences exist, I follow significant findings with post-hoc tests to determine exactly which groups differ from one another.
* Throughout the study, statistical significance… Was evaluated using a p-value of less than .05.
* So, this brings me…
* to my first results, which is mental health. And students who experienced parental death reported significantly higher depression and anxiety than students who had not experienced parental loss. However, an important gender difference did happen.
* Bereaved girls reported the highest depression and anxiety across all four groups, and this suggests that girls may be more likely to internalize grief emotionally, which aligns with previous literature on adolescent bereavement.
* These findings emphasize the importance of, like, providing accessible mental health services, particularly for grieving girls.
* Second were my behavioral outcomes. And when we examined behavioral outcomes, we observed a different pattern also. Students who'd experienced parental death reported more school trouble and skipping class.
* However, bereaved boys showed the highest level of behavioral problems, and rather than expressing grief, like, primarily through emotional symptoms, boys appear more likely to exhibit externalizing behaviors such as disciplinary issues and absence… and being absent.
* These results suggest that grief may look different depending on gender, reinforcing the need for different intervention approaches.
* Lastly, I did academic outcome results. Now.
* This finding was particularly surprising to me, because based on previous literature, I expected parental death to decrease academic engagement.
* Well, while the overall ANOVA was statistically significant, I did a post-hoc test, and it showed that most of the differences between groups were not statistically significant after adjusting for multiple comparisons, and this suggests that parental death itself was not strongly associated with academic engagement in this sample.
* Females do have higher academic engagement than males, but parental death in this sample does not impact that. And this finding highlights an important implication for schools, I believe. Educators and school staff should avoid assuming that students are coping well simply because they are performing
* adequately, academically in the classroom. Some grievance students may use school as a source of structure and stability, while others may continue to engage academically as a way to maintain a sense of normalcy during a different time.
* So… The major findings in my study was that depression did increase with parental death.
* And it was higher in girls. Anxiety did increase with parental death, it was higher in girls. Academic engagement in this specific data set, there was no significant change, but school trouble increased.
* in parental death overall, and boys, though, were highly affected. Skipping class increased because of parental death overall, and boys showed that greater also.
* And I believe…
* That, overall, this differences… these differences allow schools and policy makers to create more targeted and effective interventions.
* So, this brings me to my policy implications. So, I believe first that schools should establish bereavement identification protocols so grievance students can be recognized early.
* Secondly, schools should strengthen emotional support services for bereaved girls through counseling and peer support programs.
* Thirdly, schools should develop behavioral intervention strategies for bereaved boys, including mentoring and restorative approaches.
* Then, bereavement should be formally integrated into school policies alongside the mental health initiatives.
* And I also believe that teachers, counselors, and administrators should receive grief-informed training to recognize signs of bereavement, and have a very proactive relationship with the students.
* Finally, I believe stronger partnerships between schools, families, and community organizations can ensure grieving students receive coordinated support both inside and outside of school. And I believe that these recommendations move beyond simply identifying grief, but they focus on responding effectively.
* So, like all research, this study does have limitations.
* The data is cross-sectional, so as we know, we do not know the time these children lost their parent, whether that was infancy, youth, adolescent. It also did not…
* Include information about their social, economic background, and circumstances surrounding their parental death.
* And also, the data is self-reported and limited to high school students, so the findings may not generalize to every population. And from myself and experience, sometimes students may not want to…
* tell how they really are doing mentally and emotionally sometimes with grief, because they don't want, as we know, pity sometimes, so they show up as their stronger selves. And then despite these limitations, this study does contribute valuable evidence supporting the need for grief-informed educational policies and gender-responsive interventions.
* So, thank you.
* And I also believe that every student's healing matters.
* So, does anyone have any questions for me?
* Thank you for this fantastic presentation. During your talk, I was thinking about the COVID pandemic, and obviously there are many… this huge wave of bereaved children, and so I was wondering to what… if there was,
* policy conversation, like you're kind of talking about here, is that… is that… did that happen, or is there still an opportunity to have that happen? Because, I mean, I think that's just… obviously, those children are now, you know, in your… at your age now, right? That are… so I… I… if you have any thoughts on that.
* So, when it comes to COVID-19 studies, I actually didn't find much information on that.
* But I do know, over time, like, after COVID-19, a lot of children have become
* more depressed and also have more anxiety. And I think because they were at home, during a long period of time, as I said, some students, like, put a lot of effort into other places in their life, so students dealing with parental grief may put a lot of work into their academic settings because…
* you know, they feel weaker in that area, right? So, in order to feel stronger, they're like, okay, I gotta go get it, right? So, because of that, and COVID-19 affecting not being able to go to school, I believe that's what onset so many depressive and anxiety symptoms to students.
* Thank you. I have two related questions. The first relates to what I think is a really important, takeaway that you gave us, so, one being that the most observable things…
* are not the things that differ, right? And so, we need different metrics to track, and so that's… the first thing I want to ask you about is how exactly do you envision, sort of, implementing or tracking that if we're not going to observe
* differences in academic performance, as you noted, and the other thing I thought was really interesting along those lines is that we're not observing the gender differences in the behavioral outcomes. Even if the behavioral outcomes differ, they're not differing by gender, so we're not observing something important. So, first question is, like, so how do we observe the things that matter, both
* overall and gender-specific. And relatedly, I'm interested in this measure of behavior and what all went into that. So that's just sort of a technical question, and maybe disaggregating that, does that help us differentiate by gender? Does that help us measure anything? Thank you. So, to answer your first question, I believe that…
* A way we could possibly examine, like, the difference between girls and boys is, number one, in elementary school, when you go, like, when children, you know, like, go into school, that they have, like, a mental health assessment, basically,
* And we can, you know, in school in general, we track behavior. So, most of the time, like, if a student
* maybe dealing with something in elementary school, sometimes they can possibly still be dealing with that in high school, right? But I believe if we track over time, you know, if we actually pay attention and have a proactive relationship, because I feel like teachers don't have proactive relationships, especially with children that deal with parental death, I've even personally been in classrooms where my professor, you know, may have said something like, oh, go home and tell your mom, well.
* mom's not here, right? So you have to be able to have a proactive relationship with your students in order to understand their behavior. And…
* I believe that if you also do an assessment with them coming out of high school, too, that we'll be able to track their behavior overall.
* Do you have time for another question?
* Okay.
* Excellent work, Tony. Thank you so much for sharing your research with all of us. So, as I was listening to your presentation, I was thinking of, like, the role of household composition and how this might impact, you know, children's,
* mental health, and their, what was the variable? Like, school troubles? Yes. So I was wondering if you thought at all, like.
* does,
* Like, if children who still live with their other parent, or who are in foster care, or who live with grandparents, siblings, you know, extended family, like, do you suspect at all that this may have an impact
* In children's experiences with depression, anxiety, or how they're behaving in schools? Absolutely. Number one, I feel like…
* When, you have a parental parent that, you know, passes away, you…
* you may be housed with your grandmother, you may be housed with… if you lose your mother, your father, your father, your mother, as you said, foster care. And I…
* totally believe that that most definitely has a big impact on the way you grieve, and how you fill that void. I do know, even, like, in previous research, literature and stuff like that, that some students who
* were in foster care have worser outcomes, right? Because they feel like, A,
* biological parent, or biological, family member did not want them, right? Whereas some students who, you know.
* lived with the other parent, they felt a little more sense of safety, and so that most definitely has a different, impact in depression, anxiety, and even behaviors. And sometimes, as we know, children may even act out because they feel they want, attention, and they're not getting that.
* So I had a similar question along the same lines, like.
* I'm sure you don't have this data in the data set, but I'm wondering if who the parent is matters for the outcomes that you're seeing, so whether they lose the male parent, and that's the male… the sole provider of the household, versus, the female parent, and maybe…
* she's the one taking care of the home, like, the gender differences that you'll see based on who they lose in the family, but then also, and I'm not sure if you did this, I can't remember the relationship that they have, like, I could see, like, controlling for a teacher relationship, or, like, the,
* whether they believe they have a positive relationship with teachers, because I could also see maybe if they lose a female parent, having a positive teacher relationship could affect them. So, I'm just wondering any thoughts you have around that, like, does it matter the parent you lose? This data set doesn't exactly,
* give me, you know, the ability to study that, but from personal experience and previous research, I actually did research this past semester on specifically maternal loss, and of course, in girls, it was
* they were way worse than high, anxiety and depression. And that… Same… gender, significance.
* does impact differently. Even, like, when girls, for instance, they lose their mother, whether it be, like, graduating high school.
* Starting college, having a child, all of those also, like, reiterate grief, again, because grief is…
* never linear, it continues. And so, because of that, like, Students do,
* have, like, higher depression and anxiety symptoms. And also for boys, when they don't have their father, it creates a lot of more behavior problems, because
* they may feel like they don't have discipline in their life, and that's what, like, previous literature has showed. But, in the future, I most definitely am looking forward to researching more into that. So thank you guys for all of your questions.
* Yeah, once again, congratulations, great job. Both of these presentations have been amazing, and you're in for more. Joasia Jacobs, I welcome you to come and join us, and lead us in the third presentation for this morning.
* Sorry, friends, let me get this together.
* Seeking Help. Mental Health Service Barriers Among Black Adolescents. Good morning, everyone. I am Joisha Jacobs, a rising senior Sociology and Comparative Women's Studies double major on the pre-law track with a concentration in women's Health and a minor in Spanish from Miami, Florida.
* So first, children exposed to adverse childhood experiences, also known as ACEs, particularly exposed to more than 4, are more likely to have mental health disorders. So I want to put that into perspective for you today.
* In this data set, we have nearly 1 in 3 students who have high ACEs.
* Let that sink in.
* Mental health services are increasingly available worldwide, but more particularly in schools, yet many students still do not seek help.
* And so despite experiencing high rates of trauma, the intersection of trauma, stigma, and help-seeking behaviors among Black adolescents remain an important area of research. I hope to fill that gap a little more for you today.
* So, for my conceptual framework, adverse childhood experiences is defined as potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood, including abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, and exposure to violence.
* While dose-response relationship tells us that for every one increase in adverse childhood experiences, the likelihood of negative mental and physical health also increases.
* But Anderson's behavioral model of health service use tells us that health service utilization is influenced by predisposing characteristics, enabling resources, and perceived need for care.
* And mental health stigma, as we know it, is embarrassment, perceived stigma, poor mental health literacy, and concerns about confidentiality that remain as the most common barriers for adolescents.
* And now, my theoretical framework. I use three theories to conceptualize what is going on, but first we want to use John Henryism, which is the intersection of race and class in Black adults. So John Henryism is defined as a cultural adaptation on the part of newly freed people faced with the daunting task
* for… of creating for themselves an American identity.
* To be authentic, that identity had to make possible a coherent expression of core American values, such as hard work, self-reliance, and freedom.
* While for the way we're trying to conceptualize it here in this dataset, we're looking at adolescents. So I'm using Strong Black Girl Schema to theorize what is going on with our girls. And so, Strong Black Girl Schema is essentially used as the beginning of Black girls subscribing to Strong Black Woman Schema.
* And this is the idea that Black women should be strong, psychologically resilient, and pillars of the black community. While for black boys, that looks a little different. They're using what I title the last resort model, but it's conceptualized by Dr. Williams.
* So first, black boys prioritize self-reliance and informal networks.
* And their transition into formal care only comes from one in three ways.
* So, first, we have choice, and that's only triggered when their informal networks, such as maybe a trusted adult, a coach, or even a barber, can no longer provide for them. But guided is then when their informal networks, as previously stated, is suggesting that they should go see professional care.
* But the last one is mandated, and that's when help-seeking is enforced due to external behaviors, such as truancy or even violence.
* And so, that leads me to my research question. How do trauma exposure and mental health stigma influence barriers to mental health service utilization? And how do these experiences differ by gender?
* So I hypothesize, one, that higher ACEs will conclude to more barriers, so the more trauma that you're exposed to, whether that's internal or external, will lead you to then, be more deterred from seeking any professional care.
* Two is that the higher the stigma, the higher the barriers. So, because you are… if you experience, low perceived effectiveness within professional care, or you believe that you should be dealing with this internally, then you should… you would not want to go seek any help.
* And lastly, just because of personal experience, I do hypothesize that black girls will report more barriers than black boys.
* So for my sample size, we have a sample of 5,709 black students from the 8th to the 12th grade, with a mean age of 15.
* And this comes from a 2019 anonymous survey from a large Midwestern urban school district.
* And my statistical analyses are descriptive statistics, correlations, ANOVA, and multiple linear regression.
* So, for my variables, walk with me, because it's going to be a lot of information.
* So first, we have my first outcome, which is mental health service barriers, and that is the factors that prevent adolescents from seeking professional mental health support.
* So this is a total compos- total sum composite score of 13 items with yes-no response items. And so it comes from access and navigation, general stigma, or even low perceived effectiveness.
* So, for my first predictor, we had adverse childhood experiences, and it's trauma exposure before age of 18, both lived experiences and environmental factors.
* So this is a total sum composite score of 19 items, and it's recoded to a dichotomous variable, 3 or less ACEs, or 4 or more. And so we'll just consider that to be low ACEs or high ACEs.
* And so this is a yes or no response item as well, and it includes parental separation, abuse, bullying, and witnessing community violence.
* And so, secondly, we have school-based mental health stigma. So this is the perception of students, how peers respond to mental health concerns within the school environment. So think if their peers would make fun of them, ignore them, or also feel unsupported by them.
* And so, this is a total average composite score of 3 items, with a Chromebox alpha of .43. And this is a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1, strongly disagree, to 5, strongly agree. And this tells us that higher scores represent higher levels of stigma.
* So for my descriptive stats, girls take up about 55.8% of our sample, while boys take up 44.2.
* And girls report a little more of an average barrier than boys do, which is a 2.4, while boys report 1.7.
* And so, for average stigma score, we're seeing the same trends across both genders, essentially letting us know that students right now are in between, they're feeling very neutral. They don't know if students would actually make fun of them or not make fun of them. And so, later on, I'll tell you some policy implications that I can nip this in the bud at the moment.
* And so, as we can see here, 1 in 3 of our girls report high ACEs, while 1 in 5 of boys report high ACEs in the sample.
* So, for most common barriers, we see that across both genders, low perceived effectiveness and self-reliance are the highest. So what that's telling us is that our students are essentially saying, we don't think that, these professional care supports will actually help us, so we're gonna deal with these things internally.
* And so, for trauma exposure, among at both groups, parents separated and high exposure to violence is what we see as the most common ACEs. But I want to draw your attention to unloved. This is the only ACE that Black boys report higher than Black girls, at an 18% rate.
* And so, now I need to let you know how… what is the frequency of students actually using these resources in the school.
* And students are only, as you can see from this chart, the students are only using the school-based mental health resources at a 10% rate. And that is starting with girls at the counselor, only at 9.7%.
* But as we can see later down the chart, for nurse, psychologist, and health center, boys are reporting using the nurse and psychologist health center a little more than girls are.
* And as we know from previous literature, it's telling us that students who actually access these resources find them helpful, but they do admit that there are extensive barriers that require… that deter them from actually accessing these resources.
* So that brings me to my ANOVA. So first, as we can see on the left, we have low ACEs, and from the right, we have high ACEs. And as you can see from across both groups, girls do report more barriers than boys do.
* And, you see in the high ACEs, the students do report a little more ACEs than girls do, or as the low ACEs group, rather, and these differences in mental health service barriers among all four groups were statistically significant.
* So, for my multiple linear regression, first, in comparison to low ACEs, students with high ACEs report 1.21 more barriers than students with low ACEs.
* And for every 1-unit increase in school mental health stigma, students are reporting a .16… An increase in barriers.
* And for boys, they're reporting, comparison to girls, they're reporting
* 0.46 less barriers than girls are, which I find pretty interesting, and it's very, linear with what my hypotheses were.
* So, for my policy recommendations.
* First, we want to increase the confidence in mental health services. So, one ways that we can address that is by including student testimonials, students who have gone and seeked professional care, so that other students are knowing that it is helpful, and that they are able to know, like, how their other peers are learning and benefiting from these experiences.
* Second is annual self-trauma and wellness screening. So as we know, in a matter of weeks or even months, you can acquire more ACEs. So if we start at the beginning of every school year, giving students a self-training, or a self-screening, they would be able to.
* identify any ACEs, and it would signal them, hey, I've… from last year, I've changed from low ACEs to high ACEs, it may be time to seek professional care.
* And of course, improve mental health service navigation. So what this may look like is having QR codes around the school so students know if they need help, this is where they can seek it.
* And four, school-based anti-stigma programming. As you can see, as of right now, students are feeling pretty neutral of whether if their peers would actually make fun of them, ignore them, or be unsupported. And so what we want to do is, during the months of
* Whether that's in October for, World Mental Health Awareness, or if that's in May for Mental Health Awareness, or June for, Mental Health Awareness with Black Boys, as we can see that
* or Men's Mental Health Awareness Month in June, but what boys are experiencing right now is that they are reporting that they are feeling unloved, so being able to talk about the stigma of the students feeling,
* Judged or embarrassed by their peers.
* And so five, trauma-informed and cultural competence training. As we can see, our students are reporting high ACEs, so we want to make sure that our providers are able to reach them where they are, and are able to give them the training and access that they need.
* And six, targeted supports for students experiencing violence and family disruption. As we see from our…
* ACEs chart and trauma exposures, that that's what students are reporting the highest. So we want to make sure that our students are able to know, that our…
* That there is a support group out for them who have been experiencing this.
* And for my limitations, as you've heard before, we did have limited insight in students' experience, and as well as, like, high-risk populations, such as students who may be incarcerated, foster care, and things of that nature, were low reports, just because those students may not have been in school when the survey was given.
* And because of my composite variables being heavily skewed, right, we did have to do a dichotomous variable so that we can,
* We can make sure that it is for normality was, in check. And as well as the study design being cross-sectional.
* So that leads me to my future steps. I do want more insight on how students are perceived, mental health stigma within family and community, while also seeing what the frequency is of students who are using these resources over time, and making sure that, they are actually seeking these mental health services
* As the… as the year goes around.
* And of course, identifying factors that do promote resilience and help-seeking behaviors.
* Here are my references.
* Thank you, everyone! I first want to acknowledge Sam Hallman, who definitely has helped me through this project, my mentor, J'Mari Jackson, who's talked me down from every ledge, the YPL staff for even just being so supportive and welcoming, Carrie and Shiyu, just for, like, conducting this…
* So beautifully, and as well as my ASPIRE 2026 fellows, who have definitely supported me and family and friends.
* Thank you.
* So your sample went from 9th grade to 12th, right? Yes. Okay, so I'm… Or 8 to 12, rather. 8 to 12. Okay, so I'm interested in whether you think, barriers would be different by grade level?
* And… because I imagine that adverse effects, you might see a range, right, between all grade levels, but I'm wondering how you think barriers, especially in terms of, like, perceptions of peers and things like that, would influence, or would change by grade.
* Yeah, I definitely agree, and I do think that, when it comes to 8th graders, it may be a lack of knowledge, genuinely, and being able… and that's why I… the policy recommendation of, self-screening, so that students are aware and identifying what mental health behaviors look like, and as well as
* what is probably… and that just would attack our low perceived effectiveness, because if students don't necessarily know that they are, more probable to have a mental health condition, they wouldn't necessarily seek it. And that's why I think that self-reliance
* And low perceived effectiveness going hand in hand, because students don't think they work, so they don't necessarily… they're dealing with this very internally.
* Thank you for that question, Felicia.
* Thanks so much for that. So, throughout your presentation, I was also thinking.
* The models of how we deliver mental health and whether it is responsive to an emerging youth population, and the idea of going into someone's office in the traditional
* therapeutic model of a, you know, 55-minute conversation, or a doctor's visit, nurse's visit, et cetera, might not be the best
* mechanism or set of tools or vehicles in terms of mental health, and I wonder if you can speak to, your thoughts about whether we need to think about new models of how we deliver mental health, and kind of break out of the kind of more traditional frameworks of how we've thought about delivering therapy.
* I definitely think that maybe support groups should come on the rise, especially within a school setting, because students who
* feel like they're accessing or navigating mental health by themselves are going to go into social isolation, and then will, like, create more barriers for themselves to even, seek any mental health services. So I definitely think that that should be more on the rise. I do know that given our new day of technology, there is more telehealth.
* And that definitely can just be more deterring, because it feels like, you know, you don't have that one-on-one connection, or you don't even feel like someone's probably listening to you. So, I do think that our informal networks are really good, especially, I do appreciate that Black boys are using, whether it is their barbers, their coaches, as ways to definitely.
* become more, to speak about these issues. But I do think that maybe if we do give these informal networks some sort of training, that that can, mitigate some of the barriers that students are experiencing. Thank you.
* Thank you so much for your research.
* I'm wondering about… I'm thinking about your question, and part of what I was thinking about while you were presenting was the rise in school-based health clinics? Yes.
* Right, and the utilization of those, you know, and having that care available right in the school setting, and normalized in that way, and the impacts. I mean, I've, I've…
* talked with counselors, we don't have enough school counselors, and that's also another problem. But we, you know, like, school counselors who can then have that connection.
* with the student, but then can walk them to the school-based health clinic, for that connection, and be that bridge and that trusted person. And so I guess I'm wondering about.
* That as another policy recommendation, and something to think about in the constellation of, responses to this.
* Yeah, absolutely. I do believe that that can… we will be able to benefit from something of that nature. I do think, as of right now, students aren't necessarily, and as we can see, like, students are using the counselor at a higher rate than other students, like, than any other mental health-based resource.
* And I did find a little bit concerning, because when I think back on my grade school career.
* I never necessarily used a counselor for any mental health-based resources. To me, it was more academic, if anything. So I found that to be very… I was very curious about that, because we don't necessarily know what these students are even using these, resources for.
* But yeah, I do believe that if we can mitigate and that, Laura, like, bridge that gap within the counselor and as well as the mental health professionals, it'd be very perfect. Thank you.
* Fantastic presentation, Joe Asia. Thank you. You killed it. You killed it. I'd love to hear you kind of speak about, you know, again, adding this, this, talking about this bridge, and, and how…
* how you can build trust. I think that is something that…
* perhaps may be understudied. So, just, what are your thoughts about how trust can be built
* Because the more immediate contact person in schools often is the teacher. Yeah. And…
* What is miss… what do you think is missing, based on your research, is missing, or would be helpful for teachers to build…
* that trust. There is always the student-teacher relationship, but what is missing
* From, in your mind, what is missing that could help teachers, help students, and realize that you have these plethora of resources, and that we encourage you to take advantage of them?
* Absolutely. I think, one of the few things is that when we talk about, especially in the Black community, when we bring up social worker, you think about someone who's taking away people's children. When you think about psychologists, it's like, you're gonna sit on somebody's couch. So it's like, it's that stigma within the Black community of these,
* professionals, right? And so, if we can, one, inform our students from, like.
* in the classroom, or even at that counselor setting, that, hey, this is not the only avenue of what you already know these professionals to be. There are other ways that they can help you, and it doesn't always mean that if you are seeking these services, that there is something wrong with you. You just need to talk to someone.
* So yeah, thank you.
* Chaz, you had a perfect question there at the end about trust. You're, like, making the perfect transition to our next speaker, which will be Vincent Patterson. It is interesting, before, as he's coming up here, I want to also, acknowledge, and I'm so delighted that as we move into our two, our three folks from, Morehouse, we actually have
* two Morehouse alum, there are ASPIRE alum in the room, so I just want to, give a shout out and really appreciate, you coming back in to join the survey. So, Jeremiah Werther and Tyler Matthews.
* All right, come on.
* I love it, everyone was like, everyone. Thank you for the patience.
* Don't worry.
* Everyone…
* To the right.
* Yeah, so,
* One, Chaz, thank you for soft-launching my project on students' trust and authority, and I appreciate everybody for trusting me to get to this presentation, because that obviously was a little bit of a struggle, but,
* So, my name is Vincent Patterson. I'm a senior psychology major, sociology minor from Marietta, Georgia, and my presentation is on students' trust and authority. I think that, one of the questions that I consistently received while I was going throughout my project
* was, what is the importance of having students trusting authority? And I think that there are a litany of effects that go into the reasons why students trust authority, but there's a multitude of reasons why we need students to trust authority.
* Almost all people, who are socialized in this country will interact
* with the school system, and so it is extremely important that we make sure that these students are interacting with the system in a way that they believe is beneficial to them. Education, especially in this country, has multiple positive outcomes. It improves quality of life. As more people are educated, it improves standard of living. It is extremely important because it contributes to scholastic achievement. All of these things
* matter when it comes to students trusting the authorities, that they are placing their faith in the institutions they are going into. And so…
* I addressed one of these points already, which is education is useful in pushing for a better life. It increases the earning potential of students, it increases the, lives that they will be living. Additionally, teacher-student relations impact educational quality. So, as students trust teachers more, one of the things that was,
* very important throughout the research is that a lot of people consider education to just be teachers, giving information to students, but students must give their consent, and they must assent to learning what teachers are presenting them that information with. So if students are not engaged with the school system because they do not trust the school system, they are impacting their own educational quality.
* Trust is associated with higher levels of scholastic achievement. The further along that people get in their educational journeys, there are multiple, positive effects which come out of that. And additionally, trust is important
* for promoting positive relations between the supporting and the supported, specifically if that interaction is provided by those who are supporting. So if those who are supported are not trusting those institutions, negative effects
* And the effects that we are aiming to do are mitigated.
* punishment…
* is extremely important within this, system, because I think that we've talked multiple times now about how punishment is engaged within the school system. Tony talked about school trouble.
* And, Olivia was talking about, school refusal behaviors.
* Punishment is extremely important because adolescents, specifically during the time of adolescence, will engage in minor risk-taking behaviors, which means that punishment must not be excessive in terms of criticizing what will… students will typically be doing as they grow up.
* And so excessive punishment exacerbates distrust in authority, and it increases the engagement in risky behaviors. Additionally, mild punishment is effective for most students, however, students who are more challenging are typically punished with a linear scale, which is not shown to be effective, and in fact, it further deviates them
* From the outcomes that we would be expecting for those students.
* Punishments like suspension can lead to negative effects like lower mental health and physical health, academic achievement, and cognitive capabilities.
* Additionally, punishment tends to create an anger
* it tends to create anger, it tends to create defiance, and it tends to create a desire for revenge. Children who are away from school, specifically referring to the point of suspension, and this also goes to expulsion, they are more likely to commit crimes.
* Finally, effective punishment must be administered by a legitimate and a just authority, or else, once again, it further exacerbates that problem, which goes back to the point of students needing to trust the institutions which they are engaging in.
* Legal intervention is important because interaction with the justice system weakens social bonds and increases deviant behaviors and actions. Contact with the justice system creates and reinforces deviant labels.
* And a lot of these things amplify delinquency because it causes, students to develop a delinquent identity.
* One of the things that is not technically within my project, but I think that it is juvenile to not address it, is the impact of race, specifically within the school system.
* We live in a society that punishes minoritized people.
* And so black students, specifically males, benefit less from higher trust and authority, which means that even as we approach this conversation, it is important to recognize that not all of these, outcomes are equal, because we do not live in an equal society. Additionally, black students are subject to harsher punishments for less serious or the same offenses as white students.
* Finally, students with higher proportions of black students tend to have higher proportions
* tend to have higher levels of black teachers, leading to more opportunities for students to have role models that will come into play as I'm discussing the sample demographics. One thing I will, briefly mention, though, is that while black students are subject to harsher punishments for less serious offenses, so are lower performing students. So students who are not performing as well are also subject to harsher punishments, as opposed to students who are higher performing.
* So I had two research questions. One is that, do levels of authority trust differ when students deal with school infractions, which I will get into in a second, and do levels of authority trust differ when students have interactions with the justice system?
* So, for our data and sample, I used a 2019 survey of a large Midwestern, urban, large school district, and while the total sample had about 10,700 respondents, for the specific questions I was asking, there were about 94 respondents for each question.
* The ages were 12 to 18, grades 8 through 12, and as we take a look at the gender demographics, about 53, 54% were, girls, about 44% were boys, and about 3% did not identify as either.
* As we go to the student demographics by race, we will see that 63% of students were identified as African American, with the next two highest categories being multiracial and Hispanic.
* I want to point to the other category, which was composed of a few different races. There was Pacific and North Islander, there was White, there was Hawaiian slash Alaskan.
* And one of the really important things that I want to mention is referring to the race impact point, and how black students are disproportionately affected, is that there were only 77 white students within this sample.
* Additionally, 85% of these schools had been flagged for having an over 60% black student population.
* And so, as I get into my measures, this is my dependent variable, it is authority trust, and it was made of a composite score of 9 survey questions with a Kronbox alpha of .81.
* Questions were positively framed. An example of one question is, when my teachers tell me not to do something, I know they have a good reason. Another question was, I believe the discipline is fair, or that students, the teachers reward students for good behavior.
* Students answered these on a Leiker scale from 1 to 4, where a 1 is a strongly disagree, a 2 is a disagree, a 3 is an agree, and a 4 is a strongly agree, with higher scores indicating higher levels of trust and authority. This was summed up, so if, as I get into demonstrating this data, if you have a score of 3, that means that across all of these measures, you agreed with most of them.
* Additionally, measures, these are my independent variables. One was school infraction, which was measured using four survey questions that were dichotomized into yes-no answers and analyzed as independent variables for each question. So each question is one independent variable.
* The four survey questions initially indicated frequency with which students were given specific infractions, but I felt that that did not properly, explain how these relationships work, because most students are not getting suspended 10 times in one semester.
* And so, the four independent variables were trouble, which was I got in trouble for not following school rules, it was a very general question. ISS, I was put on in-school suspension. Suspended, I was suspended or put on probation, and transferred, I was transferred to another school for disciplinary reasons.
* The other independent variable that I had was legal intervention. This was measured using two dichotomous variables that were analyzed as separate into independent variables as well, and these were also measured for mean differences in authority trust.
* The survey questions revealed either direct or adjacent interaction with the justice system, and the survey questions were as follows. For family member incarcerated, you lived with a household member who served time in jail or in prison, and for arrested, you personally had been arrested, detained, or incarcerated.
* So, as I get into my results, this is specifically for school infraction. Mean authority trust scores were moderate for all levels. So, regardless of if you had that experience or not.
* Your, the population mean was about 2.64 outside of all of these variables, which means the students did not have a strong opinion either way on whether or not they trusted authority.
* Additionally, all experiences, specifically within school infraction were statistically significant, although the effect that they had on authority trust were pretty low.
* So, if you look at the p-values for all of these, all of these are statistically significant, they are below the .05 threshold, but if you take a look at the Cohen's D's, all of these are below the, effect size of small, except for the experience of getting transferred, which is at .22.
* As we get into legal intervention, having a family member in jail had a nearly identical mean score with authority trust, for those who had the experience of having a family member who was incarcerated, and the experience of being arrested did lower mean authority trust score, although it was a very small difference.
* And so, once again, for the experience of having a household member who was incarcerated, that approach significance, it was about .057, if I were to add, another decimal point, but it was not statistically significant, once again, with a very small effect size.
* And the experience of being arrested did… was statistically significant. However, it was once again a small effect size.
* And so, I think that this poses a very interesting discussion. I think the reforms need to be made to the ways in which we currently punish students. One of the things that was consistent throughout the literature is that
* A lot of the ways in which we, address punishment is not effective, especially because a lot of the time, punishment acts as a reinforcer for students because you are exacerbating those differences.
* And for those who are not in psychology, a reinforcer is just something that increases the likelihood of a behavior occurring again.
* Additionally, research on if students perceive authority as a punishing entity or a legitimate entity needs to be done. It was also very interesting that within the literature, it stated that the legal system and the school system are, essentially similar entities to students because of their ability to dole out punishments.
* Limitations included troubled students are unlikely to respond to surveys like this anyway, especially because if you have extreme distrust in this system, why would you feel a need to respond to the system? And furthermore, there is a link between delinquency and truancy, so you may not be in school, or if you are suspended, you do not have the ability to respond to this survey.
* And lastly, the small proportion of students who find… who receive consistent trouble make it difficult to truly inter… to truly gauge perceptions and interventions on this topic.
* These are my citations, but I will refer… I will return to my discussion, and I am open to any questions now.
* Thank you for that, that's fantastic. I really, as an epidemiologist, I am so thankful for you presenting the Cohens. Like, I mean, I wish that my students could… my master's students would be that rigorous in their work.
* So thank you for that. But it triggered in my mind this idea of, like, the law of small effects, and sort of, like, the accumulation of experiences, both for the individual, but my question is actually about
* at the school level, so is this a school that punishes kids, that where kids get suspended more often, right? So there's presumably, like, there's a principal or some authority member at the school that sort of…
* driving how the school approaches this type of behavior. So I guess I'm wondering in terms of if you're either, for your next steps, or if you're aware of literature that has looked at variation at sort of the top in leadership, in sort of how these kind of minor infractions are treated, is it a more punitive school or a less punitive school? So even if I, myself.
* am not suspended. If I… if the vibe in the school is, you will be suspended, does that erode trust? Because it doesn't nearly have to be my experience, but my friend's experience that might impact my opinion. I am very glad that you asked that question. I actually did conduct a little bit of research on that, and one of the things that I find extremely important is to mention that, to answer your question, yes, if you live in an area where you experience
* vicarious interaction with the justice system through other people, your experience with authority is also now negatively perceived. So, one of the things that was very consistent throughout the literature is that students who interact with the justice system have a negative perception of trust. And what was very important, though, is that you do not have to have direct impact or direct interaction with that study, which is why I measured not only adjacent.
* but also direct. That was why both of those were important to me.
* But it was stated that if you had vicarious interaction, specifically through friends, you were more likely to have lower levels of trust and authority.
* Hi, it was, really interesting,
* And I think one of the most interesting things that I found, related to the Cohen's D, was, I mean, the really small magnitudes of the difference between
* kids who got into trouble and kids who didn't get into trouble. I think that's… that was surprising, probably, to me and most of us. I think that's, like, the perfect opportunity to learn something new and different,
* I'm curious what you think might be some explanations for that, and then also wondering whether you had a chance, or what you would hypothesize, for differences across groups. Like, I think that was the diff… that was the difference for all students.
* would… would be different for boys versus girls, or black versus Hispanic students. Okay, so, within that question, one thing that I would like to say is that
* I do believe that there would be differences between, different genders and different, races, especially because one of the things that was also consistent in the literature is that boys tend to be punished more than girls, but they also tend to experience suspension specifically more than girls.
* And additionally, going to the point of racism, I think that the…
* punishments that students are receiving, specifically for infractions, I think that that is something that they pick up
* pretty quickly. I would also go to the point of mentioning the sample… I think that that was one of the reasons that the demographics of the sample were so important to me, is that I think that if you were to take the authority trust scores of potentially a different institution, of a different area, where you have a different demographic, so you have more white students, that would give you the ability to leverage these different groups against each other, but especially because this sample was comprised of mainly minority
* students, I feel like that was representative of how they may specifically feel, but I think that that may also be skewed because, as we mentioned.
* higher levels of black students are associated with higher levels of, black teachers. And so, potentially, within the school district, not only are you having high levels of minority students, but you're having high levels of minority professors, which may cause moderate levels of trust when, if you were to be in a level where you had minority students with higher proportions of white teachers, you have lower levels based in that area.
* I'm over here cheesin'. For those that are online, I'm cheesin'.
* Excellent presentation. I want to learn a little bit more about your thought process and your selection of terms.
* you talked about trust, you talked about authority, and you talked about punishment. And I understand those are words that appear in the literature as well. I'm wondering, were you thinking about what other terms could be utilized, or did they have a specific purpose? So, you know.
* With punishment, could there have been a substitution with consequence? With authority, could there have been a substitution with structure?
* And with trust, could there have been a substitution with, maybe some other term, or maybe, like, confidence, or something like that. So I'm just kind of thinking about what is your intentionality behind these terms, and…
* you know, what kind of was your purpose of using these specific terms? The reason that I used these specific terms is that I think I wanted to get a specific point across.
* I think that a lot of ways in which we talk about how students are disciplined, it is mainly punitive. And I think that the ways in which people think about consequences tend to be about punishment. I don't think that consequences has a positive connotation to anybody. I think that some people recognize that there can be a positive connotation to consequences, but I think that specifically punishment gives you a specific idea of what I am talking about.
* I think that the ways in which I address trust gives you a specific perception of how students are interacting with that authority. And I specifically use authority because I think that the ways in which people typically identify the school system is not as a structure, it is as an authority which is in domination of students. That was one of the other things that was consistent throughout the literature, is that specifically, schools and teachers have to assert their dominance over
* and expect them to assent their will to learn. And so I think that all of these variables and the ways in which I discussed it provide a specific context to how students are also themselves viewing discipline.
* This is great, thank you, thank you very much, Vincent. I am now going to turn things over to another colleague, to Donovan Correll, who will come up and share his research findings.
* Hello, everyone.
* Hello? Hi.
* Let's hope we have no problems with this.
* Perfect.
* Perfect.
* Hi, everyone. My topic is delinquency, mental health, and the Counselor Relationship, and I am Donovan Correll, a junior political science major from PG County, Maryland, who also happens to go
* to the greatest institution, Morehouse College. But before we get into the good stuff, let's talk about me a little bit. Oh, how do I get it presenting?
* We're okay with this. Okay. I come from Morehouse College, I'm also from the state of Maryland. Some of my interests include book reading, so if you have any books, recommendations, please send them my way. I also roller skate in my free time, and I hope to go to law school after I graduate from Morehouse.
* Going into my, my project, I want to talk about adolescence first. We all remember when we were kids. Adolescence is a period marked by a lot of changes, socially, emotionally, in terms of family dynamics.
* bodily, and this comes with a lot of concerns for our kids. It says that at least 1 in 5 children in America go through at least one type of severe mental health crisis during their adolescence. And, spurring to these mental health crises comes with lower academic achievement.
* Risky or delinquent behaviors when they're in school, interpersonal and intersocial, more interpersonal, intersocial needs, that just means that we need to look at the resources we have for our kids more, more, more closely.
* But all of these things, dropout rates, absenteeism, truancy, increase for students who have already had contact with our criminal justice system, those who are already delinquent.
* All of these mental health challenges increase tenfold for those who have experienced either being incarcerated, arrested, detained, or criminally cited by our police.
* There has been literature that's examined, the connections interdependently between, like, mental health and juvenile deliberate by themselves, but not much has been focused on how these, factors are intersectional and compounding on our students, and there hasn't been much focus on how this affects, their perspectives of their closest mental health resource, which, in our case.
* Is the counselor, the social worker, and the psychologist.
* So my research question going into this was what impact or influence does arrest history and mental health have on our students' perspective of their closest mental health resource? And I had two hypotheses.
* The first being that arrest history or juvenile delinquency, will correlate to lower rates of visiting the school counselor, as well as lower rates of finding these interactions particularly helpful for them.
* And my other hypothesis was that both anxiety and depression, which are measured here, will show twinning trends, with both, leading to lower perceptions of healthfulness, as well as lower levels of utilization.
* And my methodology, you've heard this before, large Midwestern urban school district, it was a survey. Ages were from 12 to 18 years old, grades 8 through 12. For this project specifically, I ran 6 multilinear logistical regressions.
* And, we'll talk about those soon. And the variables I use for my outcome
* were the school counselor, school social worker, and school psychologist usage. I used these as three, separate outcome variables. It was a very simple question, have you ever used X resource? Yes or no, so it was treated as categorical. And my second, my next three outcome variables were, did you find these resources helpful? Which was, again, a yes or no question of, did you find X resource helpful?
* When you used it.
* And this is for, like, kind of a definition of what social worker, psychologist, and counselor mean. A counselor is more of a general resource, more for academic readiness, as Joasia said earlier, not necessarily for mental health preparation. This is available for all students, there's no, like, specific tailorization between different groups. The social worker is a little more tailored, a little more intense. It's specific for students who are experiencing
* from a low economic background or some kind of family or environmental struggle that makes them at risk for need. And the social worker is there to both fit students or find students who are at risk and pair them with the resources of the state to make sure that they're receiving help.
* And a psychologist is the most intense and most tailored, specifically for students who are, showing disruptive, antisocial, or psychological, at-risk behaviors while they're in school. So that's, like, the most intense of the three outcome variables.
* Next are the predictor variables. I looked at arrest history, which was, again, a simple yes or no answer of, have you ever been criminally cited, detained, arrested, or at worst incarcerated? This was treated as the main categorical variable. The anxiety and severity were used,
* We're used, standard, scales, the GAD scale for the anxiety, and the PHQ scale for, depression.
* They were then split into subgroups of those who experienced
* None, mild, moderate, or severe levels of both anxiety and depression, and then I collapsed them into those who experienced none or mild levels of anxiety, and those, again, for depression, and then those who experienced moderate or severe levels of anxiety or depression. So there's a high group and a low group for each.
* Then the demographic variables, race and gender. For race, I collapsed, Middle Eastern, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander… Pacific Islander and Multiracial into one group, given they were, like, had a low participant count. And then for gender, I did the same thing for those who were non-binary, or who were selected other.
* For race, I made the variable in reference to black African-American students, and then for gender, I made the reference to women students, women or girls.
* Okay, the exciting part. There's gonna be a lot of numbers. I ran 6, regression models, but I'm gonna, you know, walk us through it, so don't be intimidated by the numbers.
* The first is the regression for usage of a counselor. We found that this model was significant, so there are, relationships here that we should examine. Specifically, arrest history and men and boys. Those who have experienced of arrest… experienced arrests had 45% greater odds of using a counselor than those who didn't, which, if you'll remember, that is a markedly different result than what I thought,
* Than what my hypothesis was.
* As well as for men and boys, they experience, I think, 22% lower odds of using a counselor compared to girl students. And then for Hispanic and Asian, they also use a counselor less, than black students.
* For the actually finding the counselor helpful, though, the only two predictors for this
* were high anxiety and high depression, which both equated to finding the counselor less helpful. For anxiety, it was a 55% lower odds of finding this interaction with the counselor helpful, and then for depression, it was slightly less, 48% lower odds of finding the counselor helpful.
* And another interesting thing here is that though, there was a correlation between arrest history and using the counselor, there was no relationship between those students who have experienced delinquency actually finding these interactions helpful, which is going to be a trend we see, again and again through each relationship.
* This is just, again, summarizing what I'm saying, that though arrest history is a predictor of using it, it's not for finding it helpful, and that the only predictors for finding these interactions helpful is the severity of depression and anxiety, both of which correlate to lower levels of finding it helpful.
* Next, onto the social worker dynamic, we see again that arrest history is a consistent predictor of using these mental health resources, which, again, is not… is a markedly, markedly different from what I originally thought, before starting this project, which leads me to think that there must be some sort of
* Referral method, or, like, that's involuntary for these students, that they're not choosing of their own volition to go see these, resources.
* But what's different here with the social worker versus compared to the counselor is that depression, high levels of depression, is also an indicator for using the social worker, which it wasn't for when we were looking at the counselor.
* Looking at, actually, if the social worker is helpful, we see that arrest, again, is not correlated with perceptions of helpfulness, but we will see that higher levels of depression and higher levels of anxiety absolutely is, and that they are both negative. It's almost twinning trends. Anxiety, again, is almost 50%, almost correlates to 50% lower odds of finding the social worker helpful.
* And the same is said for depression, that if you have high levels of depression, you have an almost 50% lower odds of finding these interactions helpful.
* Which leads me to think that there is some sort of breakdown in how we're treating these students. That we're able to recognize those who are most at risk for need, but we don't know the treatment necessary for them to get them in adequate mental conditions.
* Again, this is just a summary of what I've told you before.
* Looking at the last, the last relationship, the psychologist's usage, this, again, was another model that was significant, and you'll see again that arrest history is a consistent predictor for usage of these mental health resources. And again, as well, depression, depression as well.
* With anxiety, with rest history, though, concerning the psychologist, it's a much more significant relationship than the other two. If you're a student who has been arrested, you're almost 2.5% more times likely to see the psychologist compared to those who have not been arrested.
* And for depression, it's about 50% higher odds of seeing a psychologist.
* And the last model of psychologist helpfulness is the only one that I found not to be significant at all, and I think this is because of the low sample count for those of you that are psychologists. It's only about 300 students compared to both the social worker, it was 700, and then the counselor, it was, like, over 1,000.
* So, because of the low count of those who use the psychologist, I can't draw any statistical significant relationships.
* But what does this mean, discussion? So, what I want to, draw out from this is that there's a common, conception that we can address mental health simply by increasing
* access to our counselors. But this isn't necessarily true. That utilization and effectiveness are two related processes, but are not suggestive upon one another. That if one sees a counselor, they won't necessarily find these interactions helpful.
* And again, one explanation of this is that these mental health resources are not being treated as voluntary methods that students can choose to go to, but that they're being involuntary, remanded to them, against their will as disciplinary measures.
* Yes, yes, yes. And why they're doing this is because, like, schools, school teachers are seeing disruptive behaviors by not necessarily seeing the underlying causes behind it. And because they're seeing these disruptive behaviors, acting out, talking back, fighting, substance abuse, they're seeing these things, and then they're automatically saying, okay, go see the specialist, go see the counselor, the psychologist, so-and-so.
* And that, if the most important thing from this slide is simply seeing…
* That we cannot see these processes as one, as uni, but that there are two separate and distinct things that must be treated in their own separate and distinct way.
* Next we'll look at arrest history and service use. All of these things make sense, that arrest history is a consistent predictor, especially if you look at the counselor as a disciplinary measure. Also, if you understand that most students who have experienced arrest history, again, experience all of these psychological crises, mental health, and depression, more so than students who haven't been.
* And the most, interesting thing I want to pull from this article
* Or, from this slide is that, again, providing services is simply insufficient, that we must look at the tailorization and specialization of these counselors if we want to adequately address the crises our students are facing.
* Looking at mental health severity and perception, a probable explanation is that those who are experiencing higher levels of depression and anxiety are going to require, more specialized treatment, more intense treatment that's simply incompatible with how our school systems are treating these students. They're not made…
* To look at each student as their own individual with their own set of needs and own set of backgrounds, but we're trying to use a catch-all approach to address these students, which is understandable, one.
* But still insufficient nonetheless.
* And what I want to also pull from this article, comes from D'Amico 2016, is that perception students have before going into these interactions with their counselors, social worker, and psychologist, is a determinative
* or predictor of how they will view their treatment. That if students view these resources as disciplinarians, or they view these resources with negative perceptions already from the outset, that this is going to have an effect of how they view their treatment afterwards. So it's necessary to, like, make sure we're changing our students' viewpoints of how they view them originally before they even enter the room.
* Where do we go from here?
* The two questions I had that I think should be resourced, or researched more, more critically, is that what characteristics of treatment are having the most impact on our students? Is it how often they're visiting the council's office? Is it the intensity of the relationship between them, if they're closer? Is it…
* the referral process itself that's infecting, how they see them. Like, what aspect of treatment is influencing, their perceptions of their, of their counselor?
* And the next question I had was, what does the kind of treatment for the most severe, depressive, and anxiety-ridden students, what does that actually look like in effect? That's something a little harder.
* And so I think the two policy recommendations I have is expanding the training for counselors, not necessarily the quantity of them, but the quality of them, and making sure that each counselor is specifically tailored to different subgroups of students who need them most. And then secondly.
* Oh, well, again, to kind of tie into it, but making sure counselors are specifically set to the different subgroups who need them most.
* Limitations, this study was not made for this type of project. I only had two questions related to the counselor. Had you ever used it, and did you find it helpful? Even the usage of the word helpful, what does that mean in this context? Like, how do you know?
* what helpfulness means for each student, that's a limitation. As well as, a lot of these students are really young. I think the youngest was in 8th grade. They don't necessarily know the difference between a psychologist, or a counselor, or a social worker, so there's not… there might be a lot of bleeding through between each of the categories and how students are answering the questions.
* Racially, there's, like, small sample sizes of students who weren't black, so any kind of relationships I drew within the project, they should be interpreted cautiously.
* And as well as the models, although most of them were significant, they were not necessarily causally causally or predictive of one another. That means that there's probably other variables not accounted for within the dataset that are having some kind of influence in how students are answering their questions.
* Unfortunately, that's all the time I have before you. But thank you to the Youth Policy Lab, the Fords team, thank you to, Dr. Sam Hallman for her work in helping us, thank you to my mentor, Chaz Phillips, thank you to Carrie and Shiyu and all who helped make, make this program what it is.
* Yeah, really interesting, great job.
* So I was curious, I mean, the differences in helpfulness were, like, was puzzling, and I think you offer some good explanations. It made me wonder, just kind of even prior to that, what were the initial levels, like the average student report of helpfulness
* among the whole population, like, were students…
* What fraction of students found social workers, counselors, etc. helpful, and kind of…
* What factors do you think might go into their perceptions?
* I think the most markedly difference you'll see between, like, the whole populations will differ mostly on the basis on the fact of mental health severity, which is why I really limited it to those two variables. Across the different racial aspects, which you have to take cautiously because most of the students
* We're over-representatively black, so there's not much of a racial difference.
* But, in terms of seeing it helpful, the most, significant predictors were mental health severity using the GAD and the PHQ scales. There was also differences between how the genders saw their helpfulness. With men finding, not accounting for the arrest history and the mental health severity, you saw overall that men saw.
* the counselor and the social worker and the psychologist as less helpful than women. But I think that was about the only, drawing out I could find, not including the ones I showed.
* So, a theme in your talk, that I think is really interesting is the unintended consequence of referring people to mental health counselors when, they're grappling with some kind of behavioral issue, and it being read as a punitive
* aspects of, the consequence, or of the outcome. So, how do you… I worry about that association that people might start having in their minds of, a mental health counselor is a consequence of
* you know, some kind of involvement in the criminal justice system, et cetera, rather than a preventive, rather than a support, rather than a precursor to, some kind of interaction. So how do you… and I also think about it in the context of the last presentation of, it's not just your experience, it's the experience of other people around you, where if you see the engagement comes most often because you've gotten in trouble.
* the engagement with the counselor comes most often because you've gotten in trouble. It can create an association that I find worrisome. So I just wonder, you know, how do you…
* You've talked about how do you counteract that within your sample, but how do you counteract that more broadly in terms of how we frame mental health and the role of counselors and social workers as broader support sources, as opposed to
* Part of the punitive relationship.
* I have two responses to that. I think the first goes to simply catching these students early, before they're experiencing these symptoms before they get as bad. I think when you have students who are experiencing… who have already experienced
* contact with the criminal justice system, who've already experienced context, or contact with a legal authority, that this is going to markedly change how they view other actors of authority within the school system as well. So I think if you want to change how students are viewing
* the counselor and the social worker and psychologist. You have to catch them before they're already having this contact.
* with… the criminal justice system, because that's going to radically change how they view authority more broadly.
* I had a second response.
* What was your question, one more time? Oh, breaking the association between Right.
* criminal justice
* Right. I think there must… there also has to be, like, separate tracks for how we are disciplining students.
* I think if students are made to involuntarily see any kind of resource, that this is going to naturally be viewed as some kind of punitive response, especially when it's coming after a teacher is referring them after some kind of disruptive behavior. I think so long as teachers are taught that when they are viewing students acting out, or fighting, or talking back, or any other kind of antisocial or disruptive behavior.
* That they must then go see someone, a specialist, to get help.
* Help, so-called help.
* That they're going to naturally see this as an authority that's here to discipline me or, you know, punish me.
* reversing that. Reversing that, yeah. I think that's naturally going to happen when it's coming from a teacher referral process after there's been, you know, some kind of disruptive behavior.
* Thank you so much.
* Great research. I'm curious about… you described counselors, social workers, and psychologists, but one of the things that we see in,
* And what really happens in schools is that when our students get referred to social workers or psychologists, it's usually for testing.
* And so I'm also wondering about, and I know that the data probably didn't delineate this, but if there were actually social workers or psychologists who were actually doing therapy.
* with the students versus the students going in and having to fill out assessments and other testing, and I think that could be a very… I wonder about that as well.
* No, that's a really good point. The psychologists specifically, a large part of what their job is doing is dealing with students who are, who have special educational needs.
* who have lower IQs, or who have some kind of mental impairment that's, also causing disrupt… behaviors that's seen as disruptive or antisocial. But the data set, another limitation of it is that it doesn't necessarily address,
* students who have special educational needs in that facet, so I couldn't analyze it to the extent that I might have liked to, or that would have been helpful for this project. But it was something considered, when, you know, going through this.
* Alright, thank you all.
* All right, 5 down, one more to go. Chavis Langhorn is gonna join us, and to bring it all home.
* What a, honor, privilege, and tough task to go last after all of these, amazing presentations.
* Alright, still, still morning. Good morning! I am Chavis Langhorn, I am a now senior sociology major, communication studies, leadership studies, double minor, from Charlotte, North Carolina, at the other M, Morehouse College. And today, I will be talking to you all about… well, today, I'll be giving my presentation, and it is entitled, Tabby.
* Talk about it! Or more informed. Or more informally known by my peers and colleagues as Talk About It. Talk About It With Your Friends, peer-to-peer relationships, and bystander interventions.
* So far today, just to do a quick recap if people are joining us on Zoom, Olivia has told us about, absenteeism with our students. Tony has told us about the youth
* Navigating Seasons of grief. Joasia has let us know that they're all going through adverse childhood experiences. Vincent told us about the issues of trusting authority, and my good brother Donovan just talked about if some of these resources that are available, if they're actually helpful.
* All of these things are tied into mental health.
* But, you know, I'm a little worried, because, you know, the great, philosopher,
* Psalmist, poet, Whitney Houston once said, so eloquently, if I do say so myself, that I believe that children are our future, and if they're going through all of these different things, we have to do something about it.
* As I've just mentioned, there is a mental health crisis amongst our adolescents. In 2023, 40% of high school students reported steady feelings of hopelessness or sadness, according to the CDC. But I'm curious that, can these things be mitigated through peer supports?
* So, before we get into…
* previous research, I want to break you all through a little bit of framework, and I'm going to be using these terms a lot throughout this presentation, so it's very important that you all understand what I'm talking about. So the first thing is pro-social behavior. Pro-social behavior is essentially acting in ways that help the well-being of other people.
* Literally being kind, holding the door for somebody, asking people, are they okay, how they're doing. And also.
* I'm gonna be talking about bystander intervention. A bystander intervention is essentially a…
* type of pro-social behavior. It's essentially when someone steps into action, when they see somebody else engaging in harm of themselves or others. It can be done direct, immediately talking to that person, inter… literally intervening with them, or it can be indirect with kind of letting a third party or somebody else know about the situation.
* Previous research shows us that
* peers have positive influence on prosocial behavior within adolescents. In that study, it was essentially about peer influence between middle and high school students, just to give a little context. We also know that young women expressed greater concern in intervention efforts in comparison to young men.
* That study was done more so, for suicidal peers and interventions in that context.
* We also know that when it comes to race within college students, black students engaged in more bystander interventions in reference, or in, yeah, in reference to other races. And that study was based around, sexual violence, with college students.
* We also know that those who have completed bystander training, so these are things like about bullying or suicide, things of that nature, those who have completed these different types of training are more likely to intervene. And lastly, we also…
* know that there is a positive correlation between school climate and pro-social behavior. Essentially what this means is that the better the school climate, the more
* Yeah, the better the school climate, the more that students will engage in pro-social behaviors with each other and with the school at large.
* But, however, with all of this research, there are some gaps in terms of high school students, and also specifically in mental health contexts. Like I said, some of these studies include bullying, sexual violence, amongst other things, but not necessarily mental health as a whole.
* Which leads me to my research question. What is the association between peer-to-peer relationships and the likelihood of intervening as a bystander
* in mental health contexts. I hypothesized that students with better peer-to-peer relationships, essentially students with stronger friendships who feel very supported within their community, I believe that they were more likely to intervene as bystanders. My thought process was, if you have a strong support within your friend group, within your community.
* I believe, I thought, that you would be more likely to intervene with other people who may not have those same benefits.
* That brings us to our data set. We've heard this a few times a day. data came from an anonymous, survey of an urban Midwestern school district, collected, during… between October and December of 2019. Grades 8 through 12 are included, and for my specific data.
* I'll be looking at… it's about 8,000, well, it is 8,711 students, precisely.
* Additionally, for race, I decided to code it into 3 major categories, just to be more representative of the entire population.
* Black students, people that identified as black were 63%, those who identified as Hispanic, 11%, and all the other groups, there wasn't a substantial group, so I looped everybody else together in other.
* Kind of similar with gender. Those who identified as girls, 53%. Those who identified as boys, 44%. And those who did not identify within the binary, I combined them for other for 3%.
* Now…
* Let's get to some of my variables. The first variable I want to talk about is anxiety. I used… this variable came from the general anxiety disorder, composite. So essentially, what happens is there's 7 different questions. One example is… or 7 different prompts, rather. One example is feeling nervous, anxious, or on the edge.
* And students had to respond with 4 different responses, not at all, several days, more than half the days, or nearly every day.
* Now, these answers were coded with different numbers, so if you
* didn't have… if you didn't agree or associate with the response, your number would be lower, and if you kind of did, your number would be higher. And that brings us down to the bottom, where…
* the way I looked at this data, it was coded into four subgroups, so those who have minimal anxiety, to mild, moderate, and severe.
* And when all of that, essentially the numbers you need to know, is that students with anxiety were about 56%, based upon this, these scales, and those without were about 44%.
* My other variable, that's a control as well. I looked at depression with the PHQ, or the Patient Health Questionnaire. Similar format to the GAD, but instead of about anxiety, questions are more so tailored to depression. An example being feeling down, depressed, or hopelessness.
* Same scale, a little bit different numbers, but the same minimal, mild, moderate, to severe. And the numbers that you all need to know as well, that students that, with depression, excuse me, 62%, those without, 38%.
* Next, I want to get into my predictor variable, back to my research question, peer-to-peer relationships. This variable was… I used…
* this variable for my mental health stigma question, and essentially the question was, how comfortable would you be talking about mental health with your friends? That is how I understood and got the terminology, peer-to-peer relationships. So if we look at this chart right here, those that were comfort…
* Those who did not have comfort talking with friends, these are these…
* Light pink, the darker pink on the right-hand side, so those who didn't have comfort, between 16.6% and 11.3%.
* But the other… the blue on the left-hand side are those who were comfortable, and then the purple in the middle were somewhat.
* So out of majority of this, more people were at least somewhat comfortable, or higher, so most people had some level of comfort of talking about their mental health with friends, which I understand as most people within the sample had strong peer-to-peer relationships.
* Our other variable being our outcome variable, those who are intervening bystander intervention. This variable was from a perceived student help, scale as well, kind of similar.
* The prompt was, imagine you heard that a student at your school has depression and anxiety. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement? I would help that student, even if I didn't know them well. So this is how I understood bystander intervention. You know, would you help somebody, literally, who you did not know because of your current
* friend group.
* And as we see once again here, it's a little bit different.
* Those…
* on the… the pink on the right-hand side that you all see, more strongly disagree and… I mean, strongly disagree and disagree, so most of the sample
* would not help. And then we have a 23% kind of in the middle of neither, and then strongly agree and agree are substantially a little bit smaller on the other side.
* Now that we have our variables defined, now that we have these things out of the way, I ran a multiple linear regression, so please bear with me. There's gonna be a lot of things on this slide, but I'm gonna walk us all through it, one step at a time.
* So first up, as I said before, we're looking at these variables in relation to bystander intervention.
* I think it's important to notate that the intercept being, 3.05, essentially meaning when all of the variables are at zero, most students are pretty neutral about intervening. Our main outcome variable being peer-to-peer relationships, it shows that it's negative, but it is significant. If you look at our p-value on the far…
* right side. And in that, that means that those who have greater peer-to-peer relationships are unlikely to intervene, which actually goes…
* Against my hypothesis, and I know we're all wondering, well, why, why, why? It is very possible that students may be comfortable talking about mental health and intervening within their frame group, but not externally with other students, in their classrooms that they engage with.
* Next, we have race.
* In terms of race, I know you're wondering, well, Chave, but you said, black was a race, it is, but the way that this regression works, Hispanic is in relation to,
* black students. So essentially, what this means is that more stu- black students are more likely to intervene out of the populations. As we see with other, it was not statistically significant, with a .885 for the p-value.
* As we continue on down to gender.
* We see that, boys were actually more likely to intervene than girls, which does not,
* does not kind of coincide with the previous research that I mentioned previously. When we look at anxiety.
* those that have lower levels of anxiety are more likely to intervene than those who have higher levels of anxiety. Which, in my thinking originally, I thought maybe if you had anxiety, you may want to intervene with others to try to help others who go through the same situation, so that threw me for a little curve. And similar with depression, those who…
* Yeah, similar with depression, those who have lower levels of depression are more likely to intervene than those who do not. As a whole, we see that there is a lack of pro-social behavior, across the board, which could also be a result of the environments within the school, which brings me to my next point.
* So broader implications, I would definitely,
* push for increased research, specifically on mental health context in high schoolers. As we see that, as I mentioned earlier, the literature is already limited, and we don't have much research on this specific group. I will also call for a longitudinal study, where we can put a
* pro-social…
* that kind of goes to the next point, emphasis on pro-social behavior within SEL. SEL is social-emotional learning, for you all who may not know. It's essentially teaching emotional intelligence to students within the school system, and it's mainly about yourself, making sure that you're aware of your mental health.
* But I would suggest that there should be more emphasis on the health of others, the mental health of others. So in that study that I would…
* proposed. I would suggest that there is a… pro-social…
* There's a pro-social emphasis inside the curriculum used, and in that, essentially do a pre-evaluation to see where students are, and then have them engage in a stud… have them engage with curriculum that has increased pro-social behavior, and then do a post to see if there's a difference.
* in what is happening. And essentially, as well, as I mentioned, building community within the classroom and within the schools. As I mentioned earlier, when there's a better climate, students are more likely to be pro-social and engage with others.
* I mean, in this, there…
* There are a few limitations, as others have mentioned. This was not a causal study, I was more so looking at the associations between students who
* had strong relationships with their peers, and would they intervene? Also, the variable selection, since I was not the primary investigator who went out and assigned and got all this data, I was not able to truly have a measure to measure… I was not able to design a measure or select a measure.
* to truly understand bystander intervention in peer-to-peer relationships. As I mentioned before, timeframe, I would do a longitudinal study.
* And as well, as this is a urban Midwestern district, I'm not aware of the actual SEL curriculum where this data was collected from.
* Here are my references.
* I also just want to thank, Sam, my mentor Micah, Robin, Carrie, the YPL team. I have to also shout out Joasia as well, and the 2026 ASPIRE Fellows. So thank you for your time.
* Any questions?
* I agree.
* Sorry.
* A long time ago, I worked at Star Commonwealth, which is a residential, treatment center for, at that time, boys.
* And they use something called positive peer culture.
* And so anytime any kid was in any kind of problem, didn't matter if you were in the classroom, walking back and forth, what… didn't matter. If they had a problem, they sat down and they worked it out. The kids did, all together, and they were all taught how to do that.
* And it, it just… and then I was in Nigeria, and the last hour of the day.
* the class and the teacher had to all sit down, and they all talked about any issues that were, you know, going on. And, you know, probably not everybody brought up. But one of the things I walked away with, blown away by, is one kid said, I'd never miss that.
* That's the most important thing in my academic day.
* was that time when… and teachers were able to also express thoughts. So, I love that you did this. So, I know I don't have a question, but I love that, and I hope that and wish that we could do some of those things in our schools with the money that they don't have.
* You know?
* Excellent presentation,
* You know, one word really pops out to me when I was listening to you in this presentation, and just… the word that came to me was empathy.
* And thinking a lot about… balancing… empathy with… Self-preservation.
* And those, those came to me because I, myself, deal with anxiety and depression.
* And there are external forces that will often,
* Make us feel like we cannot act.
* Even though we want to act, and I think there's also another component in that where we recognize the humanity of others that are going through these experiences, and yet sometimes feel like we are powerless
* to help them in those moments. So I'm just… I'm just… I know this is very much a qualitative study, but I'm just kind of curious about your thoughts of…
* you know, in terms of further research and understanding the numbers, where is the idea of, you know, the SEL that talks about empathy as well? What is your thoughts, or what are your thoughts about,
* how to act on the recognition of humanity, and how to show up just as yourself, and recognizing that it's okay to show up imperfect, for those that are around us, even though we recognize their humanity, and how do we, kind of flip the script about, oh, I have to show up perfectly, I just need to just show up.
* Excellent question. I appreciate your vulnerability as well, in what you shared.
* I would say that… It definitely would have to be in the…
* That's something that has to be curated.
* I think in two ways, and I kind of mentioned them a little bit, in that SEL curriculum, but also in the climate, of the school, of the classroom.
* It is important, like what you said, is very important. There are several different.
* ways that SEL is done, that people, try to approach social-emotional education. I would…
* say, as far as research into this, I think it's important that…
* those who are developing these programs are intentional about what you just said, are intentional about empathy. Even earlier, how I mentioned about, you know, bystander intervention being direct and indirect, you know, you don't have to always say, hey, how are you doing? You can always, you know.
* the world we live in, you can send a text, you can tell somebody else, as far as from that self-point of wanting to do something. I think that, like I said, essentially.
* There needs to be more…
* research and analysis of the current SEO programming that we have. Kind of anecdotally, for, like, the kind of classroom and
* climate, part. I started this, thing at Morehouse this past semester called Brother to Brother, and we start off with ground rules, and what I call… well, actually, we call them house rules. And essentially, it's just 6 different things to literally
* show that this is a safe space. Literally, one of our ground… one of our house rules is empathy is required to be in here. Like, we have to understand that this is a space where we can come and talk, you know, we can laugh, joke, but also be vulnerable with each other. And it's important that, you know, professors, teachers.
* Have that in the classroom setting for students to feel comfortable.
* We have an online question.
* Really quick, this, requester, could you re-explain your data
* for the race of students most likely to intervene in antisocial behavior. So, I think… were there racial differences? Yeah, re-explaining that section. Yes. So, for the racial differences, as we see here, you see Hispanic and you see other. The Hispanic number, negative .22, is in reference to
* The black students, so essentially what that means is Hispanic students are .22 times less likely to intervene, meaning that black students
* are more likely to intervene. With the group of other, and with that number, it is statistically significant. If you see that far right side, that .085,
* That indicates that it's not, significant, and that could be for a myriad of reasons, mainly because other has many other different groups within that, also because of the sample and the distribution as well.
* Okay, so, one, I want to say, it was a great job, Chavis. You really spoke very eloquently, and were able to
* tell us more about your research, but I wanted to ask, given that previous research tells us that girls were more likely to intervene, and your results are telling us that boys are more likely to intervene, why do you suppose that is?
* To be quite honest with you, Joasia. And it's so funny, because, like, as I was going through the presentation this week, I was thinking about that, too. I was like, wait, why? Like, why, why, why? And I'll honestly, I need to do my own research to see a little bit more. I think…
* yeah, honestly, I have to do my own research, just to be quite frank with you.
* I think, similar to even with your research, you know, how you saw that, you know, for that one thing about love, boys were more, you know, likeable.
* they said that they felt unloved more. And it could be possible, the type of peer-to-peer relationships, I think not knowing the context of that relationship matters. I believe somebody mentioned earlier about supports within… it might have been you. Somebody mentioned earlier about supports within, like…
* sports and, you know, different clubs and activities, that could play a role, so…
* I would have to… Yeah, look into that. Thank you.
* Do we have time for one?
* Excuse me. So I found your, one of your results, which is that,
* they are less likely to intervene with people outside of their friend group, right? So, yeah, so that's really interesting, and it kind of is to be expected, you know, high schoolers, middle schoolers, it's like.
* it's very clicky, and it's who you know, and sometimes it's hard to move outside of yourself. We did research in a high school, in Dearborn, and it was really interesting. We were researching belonging, and…
* What was really interesting is that people stayed in their groups for preservation, But…
* the school was really struggling to create a sense of identity outside of these small enclaves. And so, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on, like, how to create this, like, larger school identity that can exist outside of these small groups that students actually use for preservation, whether that's culture, they had a large immigrant population, so a lot of them stayed within their groups, that's how they received help, that's how…
* They, maintained their own culture, they were able to talk to one another, because they had, like, low English proficiency, so I'm wondering, like.
* If you have any thoughts for schools, even, on how to create, larger social identities so that students are able to step outside of themselves and all, like, their small groups and enclaves.
* Thank you for that question. I think, you know, kind of to your point, it is culture.
* I think that for schools, just in a general aspect, because specifically, like, I… well, I can get to that later, but yeah. But in a general aspect, it starts with culture. It starts with the literal, how we interact with each other. It starts with how…
* you know, the mission and vision of that school. It starts with the principal, you know, and the staff, and the teachers to the students, and then also the parent aspect of students buying into the culture as well.
* That's a huge point, a huge piece. In my experience, I've only been in relatively smaller spaces, small K-12,
* Morehouse is generally a smaller institution, and what I can say is, about these different spaces.
* though we had issues like everybody else, we did have that level of pro-social behavior because of the culture we had and the buy-in of the students as well. You know, when it's cool to look out for other people.
* More people are gonna look out for other people.
* But thank you.
* I wanna actually invite all of the students up real quickly. I wanna thank… this has clearly been a day of a lot of learning, a lot of us have really… I wanna personally give a quick thank you
* for the opportunity to engage with all of you this whole summer. It's been a real pleasure and a delight to get to know all of you, and I've learned a lot from you this whole entire summer, so congratulations. Sam Hallman will, come up here and give some present, certificates, and following that, we'll take some photos and go out there and have a reception to celebrate all of you.
*