March 06, 2007
St. John’s Psychology Professor Elizabeth N. Brondolo, Ph.D.,
has garnered academic esteem during the past five years with her
cutting-edge system of measuring the effects of racism on the
health and well-being of African- and Latino-Americans. Now, with
the help of a team of St. John’s graduate students, she is applying
her methodologies to Asian populations and discovering significant
results.
According to her research — and contrary to widely accepted
societal beliefs — Asian-Americans are closely related to African-
and Latino-Americans in their day-to-day experiences of
discrimination. Consequently, their health is threatened in similar
ways.
“Discrimination and its influence on health are problems for
everyone,” says Brondolo, citing hypertension, cardiovascular
disease, depression and anxiety as common health effects of
racism.
With the assistance of St. John’s graduate students Jennifer
Atencio, Jasmin Kwok and Jahanara Ullah, Brondolo currently is
examining the racism/health relationship among Americans of
South-Asian (Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi) and East-Asian
(Filipino/Chinese/Japanese) descent. During the past year, the St.
John’s research team has been working with Asian outpatients at
Jamaica Hospital Medical Center and will soon begin testing at
Flushing Hospital Medical Center, both in Queens.
“Dr. Brondolo is engaged in some excellent projects here looking
at the effects of racism on blood pressure, says Dr. Alan Roth,
Chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Jamaica Hospital.
“But on a more general scale, she has added a cultural component to
our residency training program that has been very effective. She is
opening the minds of an entire field of young educators to racism
and medicine, showing them how personal stereotyping and bias can
affect their health care delivery.”
From New York to Bangkok
Recently, Brondolo’s research has been stirring interest abroad.
Last November, Atencio, a fourth-year doctoral fellow from Queens,
attended the International Congress of Behavioral Medicine in
Bangkok, Thailand, to present the team’s current findings on the
effects of racism on Asian-Americans.
“There’s a myth out there that says all Asians are healthy and
doing well,” says Atencio, suggesting that the false claim is
perpetuated by past epidemiological research that focused solely on
Japanese- and Chinese-Americans — subgroups that emigrated to the
United States earlier than any other Asian minority group and have
benefited from a longer adjustment period. “We can’t just clump all
Asians together,” advises Atencio, whose Bangkok presentation made
quite an impression on many conference attendees now eager to form
partnerships with the St. John’s research team.
“Jenni's presentation was insightful,” says Emily Williams, who
works for the British Department of Epidemiology and Public
Health’s Psychology Group. “I would consider including her
methodologies in my own work in the assessment of psychosocial
influence on coronary heart disease risk in U.K. South Asians, and
I look forward to reading more about this research from her and her
colleagues.”
Atencio currently is working on her dissertation examining the
effects of racism on health among multiple Asian-American
subgroups.
The Vincentian Way
According Brondolo and her team, the study of racism and its health
implications supports the St. John’s Vincentian mission of reaching
out to underrepresented members of American society.
“We just want to increase the awareness that discrimination
affects everyone, including members of the Asian community,” says
Atencio, adding that their research like theirs would be extremely
difficult to conduct in universities outside the New York City
melting pot, which has the highest U.S. populations of Filipino-,
Chinese- and Korean-Americans.
“If you have been targeted by racism, you know that it is
depressing and difficult to deal with, and that it may affect your
health,” adds Brondolo, whose studies suggest that day-to-day
racism is more common than most people believe. “We hope that by
explaining the way racism works, we can help people think more
carefully about the way we interact with others and be more open to
conversations about the topic.”
Throughout her career, Brondolo’s research has been buoyed by
her self-created “Perceived Ethnic Discriminatory Questionnaire”
(PEDQ). Designed for use with any ethnic or racial group, the PEDQ
includes scales that assess people’s lifetime experiences of ethnic
discrimination. Brondolo developed her measure in collaboration
with one of her mentors from Rutgers University, Dr. Richard
Contrada, and fine-tuned it while working alongside the medical
director at Bedford- Stuyvesant Family Health Center in Brooklyn in
2000.
Brondolo says she has administered the PEDQ to more than 2,000
subjects recruited from hospitals, community/migrant health centers
and colleges and universities such as St. John’s. She has used the
results to write eight articles, four of which have been published.
(The remaining four articles should be published soon.) The
sophistication of the PEDQ has helped Brondolo secure nearly $2
million in grant money from the National Institute of Mental Health
and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute during her St.
John’s tenure. (She also has secured an additional $1 million in
grants unrelated to the PEDQ.)
Brondolo says her next academic endeavor is to develop
strategies that minorities can use to combat the health effects of
racism.