Incidents of bias in college classrooms: Instructor and student perceptions.

Little is known about incidents of bias specific to college classrooms or how they are handled by instructors. To learn more about this subject, professors, graduate instructors, and undergraduates (N = 2,523) completed surveys assessing perceptions of classroom bias. Results indicated that about a quarter of instructors and half of students perceived an incident of bias in a classroom in the last year. Instructors’ responses to bias commonly included forms of direct confrontation, discussion, and ignoring. Undergraduates perceived significantly more bias than did instructors and rated responses to bias as significantly less effective than did instructors. Undergraduates also reported that instructors were occasionally the perpetrators of bias. These results indicate that preparation of instructors should include increased awareness of bias and methods of handling classroom bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

“Boys don't cry”: Examination of the links between endorsement of masculine norms, self-stigma, and help-seeking attitudes for men from diverse backgrounds.

The role of conformity to dominant U.S. masculine norms as an antecedent to help-seeking attitudes in men has been established using convenience samples made up largely of college-age and European American males. However, the role of conformity to masculine norms on help-seeking attitudes for noncollege-age men or for men from diverse backgrounds is not well understood. To fill this gap in the literature, the present study examined the cross-cultural relevance of a mediational model of the relationships between conformity to dominant U.S. masculine norms and attitudes toward counseling through the mediator of self-stigma of seeking counseling for 4,773 men from both majority and nonmajority populations (race/ethnicity and sexual orientation). Structural equation modeling results showed that the model established using college males from majority groups (European American, heterosexual) may be applicable to a community sample of males from differing racial/ethnic groups and sexual orientations. However, some important differences in the presence and strengths of the relationships between conformity to dominant masculine norms and the other variables in the model were present across different racial/ethnic groups and sexual orientations. These findings suggest the need to pay specific theoretical and clinical attention to how conformity to dominant masculine norms and self-stigma are linked to unfavorable attitudes toward help seeking for these men, in order to encourage underserved men's help-seeking behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)