Gülseli Baysu: Racial/ethnic discrimination and well-being || Representation in research samples

In this episode, we spoke with Gülseli Baysu who is a Lecturer at the Queen’s University of Belfast, U.K. As a psychologist she focusses, among other things, on cultural diversity, discrimination, and Muslim minorities in Europe. In this episode we talk about the awareness of ethnic/racial discrimination and how it relates to youth well-being, and inequalities regarding Western and non-Western research samples in psychology. 

PAST (00:01:43): Gülseli talks about her experiences as a “first-generation university student”, meaning that she was the first one in her family to attend university and to follow an academic career. She talks about how she draws motivation from working on interventions, policies, and strategies to advance social justice and to promote positive diversity climate in schools. 

PRESENT (00:10:33): Gülseli discusses the meta-analysis by Benner et al. (2018), where study results from many countries are combined to better understand how perceived racial/ethnic discrimination is related to youth well-being. We discuss why only few studies are included from outside the U.S. and how schools can provide coping strategies to better prepare students for dealing with discrimination. Definitions for “discrimination” are given.  

FUTURE (00:29:20): Gülseli emphasizes how important it is to have more research with non-Western, non-White participants (samples). We explain more in detail how a scientific article usually gets published, biases and flaws of the peer-review process, and how problematic it is that access to scientific literature is different between countries and regions.   

Full reference of this episode’s article:

Benner, A. D., Wang, Y., Shen, Y., Boyle, A. E., Polk, R., & Cheng, Y. P. (2018). Racial/ethnic discrimination and well-being during adolescence: A meta-analytic review. American Psychologist, 73(7), 855. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000204