Co-authors: Kennedy Coleman, Tara Greig, Kish Parikh
Abstract (click to view)
Increasingly, BIPOC college students have utilized social media to share their experiences of racialized trauma while attending higher education institutions. Presenters outline a social media content analysis study of posts from #BlackAtSMU, highlighting themes that arose. Implications at the institutional level and future directions for this assessment methodology are discussed.
Student Affairs Undergraduate Research Team
Mentor: Allison Kanny
Cole, Kennedy, Tara and Kish: Your team’s social media content analysis conducted here at SMU has a strong conceptual framework. Your findings suggest that social media facilitated discussions of experiences about race and racism and trauma. An implication of your study is the importance of understanding Black students’ experiences and working as a community to support students and to change these negative racial experiences. I’m curious to learn more about your teams’ next steps to expand your research.
I really enjoyed hearing about this work. This is such important work for informing change. I hope that you will extend to this work moving forward. One way might be to include a larger sample (maybe including other relevant hashtags?) in order to facilitate a comparative analysis across institutions. Another way to extend this work might be to dive deeper within the current context of SMU and interview students.
I enjoyed this presentation, thank you! It would be interesting to me if you could somehow acquire information about those who posted in terms of their current status (students or alumni, for example) to get an idea of the timespan of their experiences, and if the number and type of experiences have changed over the years.