By Ruth Steinhardt
Race- and culture-related stress are related to high-risk drinking behaviors among Black college students who are second-generation Americans, according to a new study led by a professor at the George Washington University.
Many college students suffer from stress, and many adopt unhealthy behaviors to cope with it. In general, college students between the ages of 18 and 24 drink more than any other age group, including their non-student counterparts.
But students from minority and immigrant backgrounds deal with an additional level of “acculturative stress,” said Delishia Pittman, assistant professor of counseling in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
“When you have constant inter-ethnic contact, there is a constant exchange of cultural information,” Dr. Pittman said.
That contact may be interpersonal, as when a friend or classmate makes an insensitive remark. Or it may be structural, as when a student finds herself unable to access a resource or perform an activity that in her home environment would have been mundane. In either case, the interactions are constant and can have a powerful emotional impact.
“One party has to give up something that feels culturally normative,” Dr. Pittman said. “For some that process is more taxing than for others, and generally it’s the person in the minority who has to make the most accommodations.”
And like all stress, its effects can range from mild to debilitating.
Studies on acculturative stress have tended to focus on international students and immigrants, Dr. Pittman said. But she began to wonder how it affected second-generation black college students, who, as U.S. citizens with immigrant parents, exist simultaneously as Americans and in their mother culture. Did that population have to deal with a unique kind and degree of acculturative stress—and if so, could it provide important information about their coping behaviors, particularly high-risk drinking?
“The answer was a resounding yes,” Dr. Pittman said.
The results of her six-year, multi-wave study, published in February in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, included black degree-seeking undergraduates between the ages of 18 and 30 enrolled at five predominantly white institutions and one historically black university. Participants rated their perceived general life stress, their level of stress related specifically to experiences of racism and discrimination, and their acculturative stress levels, and then self-reported their alcohol use habits.
Nearly 71 percent of respondents reported at least monthly alcohol use, compared to 60 percent among college students generally and 49 percent for black young adults nationally. Interestingly, self-reports of high levels of general life stress did not correlate to increased alcohol use. But high levels of acculturative stress did.
The findings have implications for clinicians at an individual level and for the field of public health more generally, Dr. Pittman said. As a counseling psychologist—a trainer of therapists—she sees the two as inextricably linked.
“Minority stress frameworks, like the one employed here, push us to investigate the role of multiple stressors that stem from minority status on the health and well-being of marginalized groups. For Black Americans, that’s often limited to racism. The reality is that health inequities show up in our work all the time, in a very practical sense. As counseling interns in our communities, my students work with people affected by them often,” she said. “So by looking at the way these experiences, stressors and traumas are impacting communities of people, we can develop more responsive interventions for groups and for individuals.
“The work we do is human work,” Dr. Pittman said. “Health disparity work is the business of people and of making them better. And that’s what we do, ideally, as therapists.”
