Counseling Psychology Faculty and Students Attend American Psychological Association Convention
Nov. 17, 2014
Mr. Barajas, who recently defended his dissertation and is currently on a pre-doctoral internship at the counseling center at the University of California, Berkeley, presented a poster on his dissertation titled “Pedagogical Approaches to Multicultural Education Within Teacher Preparation Programs.” A pre-posttest experimental design was used to examine the effectiveness of two approaches of multicultural education and the effect of placement sites on pre-service teachers completing a field-based internship. The initial findings are promising: Regardless of the teaching approach, pre-service teachers reported a meaningful change in attitudes regarding multiculturalism and diversity in comparison to other pre-service teachers who received no cultural intervention. This body of work is significant in that little, if any, experimental research have examined potential best practices in teaching multicultural education to teachers. These findings provide directions for future use in working with teachers to become informed about cultural issues and their application in working with a diverse group of youth.
Dawnielle Simmons, a second year doctoral student, presented a poster, along with Dr. Vandiver as her co-author. The focus of the poster, titled “Examining the Factor Structure of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Identity Scale (LGBIS) for LGB African Americans,” was on whether scores on the LGBIS is valid for use with African American men and women. Collecting data online via Twitter and Facebook, Ms. Simmons obtained a sample of 183 LGB African Americans. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the eight-factor model approached a good fit in comparison to reduced models. These findings provide a foundation to examine the intersection between racial identity and sexual orientation identity.
In her fourth year at WMU, Vanessa R. Laurent along with three WMU co-authors—Robert L. Harrison, Mark P. Orbe, and Lydia Kauffman—presented a poster titled “Navigating Two Worlds: How Multiracial Identity Development Informs the Counseling Process.” Through semi-structured interviews, Ms. Laurent explored the racial identity development of 20 biracial college women. Three central dimensions were identified: (a) saliency of family dynamics, (b) social interactions in homogenous settings, and (c) variations in biracial identity. These findings confirm that biracial identity development has a variety of outcomes: No specific type of identification is more prominent than others, underscoring the heterogeneity of biracial identity.
Completing her first year as new faculty at WMU, Beverly J. Vandiver, professor of counseling psychology, also chaired a symposium and gave a fellow’s talk. The symposium was titled “Forty Years of Cross’ Theory of Nigrescence—Its Impact on the Past, Present, and Future,” which focused on the work of William E. Cross, Jr., one of the preeminent scholars on Black racial identity. Vandiver also presented on the influence of the Civil Rights Movement and becoming Black on Cross’s early work. Frank Worrell, professor at University of California, Berkeley presented on the revision and expansion of the nigrescence model, followed by the presentation of Kevin Cokley, professor at University of Texas, Austin, on the evolution of William Cross’s work and its impact in the 21st century. Cross, currently a professor at his alma mater, the University of Denver, was the discussant. Professor Vandiver was acknowledged as an APA fellow for the Society of Counseling Psychology and was invited to give a fellow’s address. This honor is given to APA members who have made an outstanding contribution to a specific field of psychology, in this case, counseling psychology. Her address was titled “The Measure of an Identity,” in which she noted the importance of rigorous scale development and the impact on developing a culturally sound scale. In 2012, Vandiver received her initial APA fellow from the Division of Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics.