The STOREY (Storying Racism to Empower Youth) Intervention: Testing a Digital Storytelling Intervention to Promote anti-Black Racism Advocacy
Research remains limited on the barriers and facilitators to anti-Black racism advocacy among non-Black individuals. To facilitate greater anti-racism advocacy, narrative storytelling interventions can be a powerful tool.
Compared to information-based approaches (e.g., psychoeducation), storytelling can be a more persuasive platform to promote anti-racism. Stories can facilitate new insights that confront existing beliefs (e.g., stereotypes that promote fearful attitudes towards Black individuals) and generate greater empathy, which has been linked to anti-racism advocacy. Extending our preliminary studies, we propose to further develop the STOREY (Storying Racism to Empower Youth) intervention. The STOREY intervention involves participants viewing a 3 minute video, which features a Black woman recounting an experience in which she witnessed her son being discriminated against because of his race.
Dr. Brian TaeHyuk Keum, Buehler Family Sesquicentennial Endowed Assistant Professor, Dept of Counseling and Developmental Psychology at Boston College and his team have done pilot studies in this area and they found promising results indicating that storytelling videos on anti-Black racism have the potential to improve empathic reactions to racism and decrease fear of Black individuals, which in turn was significantly associated with greater individual and institutional anti-racism advocacy intentions.
In this MRI funded study they aim to refine the STOREY intervention by testing whether adding a critical group dialogue after viewing the video would improve the persuasive effect of the storytelling video. Additionally, Dr TaeHyuk Keum and his team will test the longevity of the effect by assessing whether participants’ intentions and advocacy activities remain sustained one month after the intervention. They will collect data from 100 college students across three time points (baseline, post intervention, and one-month follow-up) and assess whether empathic reactions after viewing the storytelling video and participating in the critical group dialogue predict greater individual and institutional anti-racism advocacy in the video + dialogue condition compared to video only condition. The quantitative data collected include stereotypical beliefs, empathy, and anti-racism identity. In addition to the quantitative data, the researchers will collect qualitative data involving the interactional processes underlying this change. The two data sources will dovetail in synthesizing the evidence of the intervention’s impact. Participants will be asked to fill out surveys after viewing the video followed immediately with the critical group dialogue and then to fill out surveys again one month later.
Findings will provide valuable evidence and direction to scale up the dissemination and utility of the intervention. The researchers’ goal is to not only document the significance and potential of the STOREY intervention in promoting cross-racial solidarity and anti-racism interests, but also to disseminate the findings in a format that can be applied to other settings by clinicians and educators. The materials and approach may be readily applied to various settings with meaningful impacts including in classrooms, clinical work, group settings and families.