Training healthcare professionals to discriminate between examples and non-examples of racial microaggressions

Abstract

President Bill Clinton's Race Advisory Board (1998) discussed racism as being nearly invisible to Americans, and White Americans are often unaware of their role in perpetuating racism today. Microaggressions are a common type of racism that take the form of denigrating comments toward those of racial minority groups (Sue et al., 2007). While often unintentional or unconsciously used, microaggressions adversely affect today's society. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate a differential reinforcement with feedback intervention to facilitate discrimination between examples and non-examples of microaggressions among healthcare workers employed by a tertiary hospital setting. We recruited 26 healthcare workers to complete three surveys via a Qualtrics survey. Baseline data showed moderately high, but variable, accuracy in discriminating examples and non-examples of microaggressions. Following the reinforcement plus feedback intervention, participants' accurate discrimination between (non-) examples of microaggressions increased. We will discuss these results in terms of using behavior-analytic procedures to effectively teach what constitutes microaggressive acts that negatively impact people of color.