The processes of getting published and submitting proposals for conference presentations "don’t necessarily get covered in the classroom," says DeAnnah Byrd. However, those were the special goals of her Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, working with her adviser and mentor Gilbert Gee. And the summer mentorship paid off this past fall when DeAnnah presented her research on the relationship between racial discrimination and psychological distress at the annual American Public Health Association (APHA) convention. Professor Gee provided "invaluable mentoring and his feedback on the presentation was extremely beneficial," she says. DeAnnah plans to publish her findings in a journal article and looks forward to working with her mentor on that, as well.

Drawing from the 2005 Adult California Health Interview Survey—a "small snapshot of the health of Californians"—DeAnnah focused on questions about the experience of racial discrimination and symptoms of psychological distress, both rated on a frequency scale (i.e., never to all of the time experiencing discrimination and none to all of the time feeling distressed in the past 30 days). Her first finding was "a significant and positive association between experiences of racial discrimination and higher levels of psychological distress"—symptoms like feeling nervous, hopeless, restless or fidgety, and worthless.

Further "I wanted to see if that relationship varied by specific racial groups," she says. "I found that it did." The two groups that reported significantly more psychological distress as a result of discrimination were non-Hispanic blacks and other ethnic minorities. While Hispanics and non-Hispanic Asians reported some levels of psychological distress, the patterns were not significantly different than those of non-Hispanic whites. "This was to my surprise, and warrants further study," she says. "Future studies should continue to examine race and other racism-related factors that contribute to mental health disparities."

Published in Winter 2011, Graduate Quarterly