Interview with Visiting Faculty Scholar of Color, Brendesha Tynes

On Tuesday February 5th, GSE’s Visiting Faculty Scholars of Color program will present Brendesha Tynes, the Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the USC Rossier School of Education.  Professor Tynes will present a talk titled, Online Racial Discrimination and Mental Health Outcomes among a Diverse, School-based Sample of Adolescents.  I had a chance to talk to Professor Tynes about her research in this emerging field, her inspiration, and advice she has for scholars who want to do similar research.

This is Part 1 of the interview.  Part 2 will be posted on Monday.

MTW: Please tell us a little about your upcoming talk at Penn and what you hope to accomplish with it.

BT: I’m going to be presenting the results from an NICHD-funded, longitudinal study of the risk and protective factors associated with online victimization.  My research team is beginning to analyze data from Wave 1 of the project. I will be presenting these results, focusing on online racial discrimination and how it relates to mental health outcomes.  Also, we’re looking at group differences in those outcomes.

There’s been a rise in online hate activity since the 2008 election of President Obama.  While we hear a ton about cyberbullying, we don’t hear about the race-related experiences that our teens are having.  I’d like to change that a bit.  I also want to show how these experiences relate to our teens’ everyday schooling experiences.

MTW: Can you tell us about some of the ways that racial discrimination online affects an adolescent differently than racial discrimination in a classroom?

BT: We are trying to figure that out.  Thus far we know that discrimination online has a unique impact on mental health, including depressive symptoms and anxiety over and above discrimination offline.  We also believe that the duration of victimization online may have a unique impact on development. The discriminatory text or image  online becomes a permanent reminder and victims may repeatedly experience an incident... on Facebook, for example where offensive language is not removed from a person’s wall. Individuals also know that a particular hate site with extreme language exists once they have either stumbled upon or deliberately viewed the site. Its permanence and the fact that it is legitimated or viewed by a wide audience may have a particularly detrimental impact on adolescent adjustment.

MTW: Who has the greatest opportunity to protect adolescents from the negative repercussions of online discrimination? Parents? Teachers? Other adolescents?

We’re beginning to see that everyone can play a role.  For example, peers and family can be buffers in the association between online victimization and depressive symptoms. [The adolescents] have fewer depressive symptoms when they have peer and family support.  When they have teacher support they have fewer rule-breaking and aggressive behaviors.


MTW: In a blended learning environment, how should an educator balance the attention they pay to the impact of virtual elements and the impact of real-life elements on the development of the students?

BT: This is the interesting thing…the line between the virtual and reality is really blurring. The virtual is real. A lot of what happens in school gets extended into online worlds.  Our teens see each other all day and then connect on sites like Facebook in the evening. 

I plan to talk about the focus of my next study, a blended learning environment where they manage to do a good job of balancing the two. 

*Part 2 of the Interview will be Posted Monday.*