2001 Carolyn Sherif Award Address: the Presence of an Absence

Conceptual Disruption

In research using self-report measures, there is little attention paid to how participants interpret concepts; instead, researchers often assume definitions are shared, universal, or easily understood. I discuss the self-anchored ladder, adapted from Cantril’s ladder, which is a procedure that simultaneously collects a participant’s self-reported rating and their interpretation of that rating. Drawing from a study about sexual satisfaction that included a self-anchored ladder, four analyses are presented and discussed in relation to one another: (1) comparisons of sexual satisfaction scores, (2) variations of structures participants applied to the ladder, (3) frequency of terms used to describe sexual satisfaction, and (4) thematic analysis of “best” and “worst” sexual satisfaction. These analytic strategies offer researchers a model for how to incorporate self-anchored ladder items into research designs as a means to draw out layers of meaning in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods data. I argue that the ladder invites the potential for conceptual disruption by prioritizing skepticism in survey research and bringing greater attention to how social locations, histories, economic structures, and other factors shape self-report data. I also address issues related to the multiple epistemological positions that the ladder demands. Finally, I argue for the centrality of epistemological self-reflexivity in critical feminist psychological research. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ’s website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0361684317725985

Feminist Psychology in the Service of Women: Staying Engaged Without Getting Married

This article, based on the 2005 Society for the Psychology of Women Presidential Address, presents a definition of feminism and evaluates feminist psychology and its current challenges through that lens. The principal theme is the tension between feminist psychology's engagement with the discipline and its ability to critique and alter both the discipline and the world. The article includes an analysis of the original 52 demands presented by women activists to the APA's Council of Representatives in 1970. Those demands are evaluated both in terms of progress and lack of achievement, as well as in terms of the limitations of the professional women's movement reflected in those original demands. The lack of success in achieving demands associated with structural change is highlighted. A framework for future feminist work that might achieve transformational change is offered.

Questioning the Unquestionability of the Expert’s Perspective in Psychology

Psychology’s infatuation with precision, objectivity, universality, refutability, and verifiability brought about a focus on the legitimacy of the perspective of the knower namely the expert who, at the center of discourse of power, could collect and analyze the data and then embark on generalizing the information for the sake of generative theories. The article argues that mainstream psychology has mainly acted from the perspective of the observer and not perspective of the actor and this has largely silenced the reality of the actor. While focusing on the underlying components of the perspective of the expert, the article calls for questioning the unquestionability of the perspective of the observer and indicates how the process of questioning may help us understand the often concealed-to-oblivion dimensions of the actors.

Antecedents and mediators of community connection in African American women with breast cancer

OBJECTIVE

To describe the theory of community connection defined as close relationships with women and men who are members of a neighborhood, a church, a work group, or an organization. Antecedent and mediator variables related to community connection are identified.

DESIGN/METHODS

A cross-sectional design was used to assess for relationships among theorized antecedents and mediators of community connection in a sample of 144 African American women aged 21 years and older (mean = 54.9) who had been diagnosed with invasive/infiltrating ductal carcinoma. MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSES: Community connection was measured with the relational health indices-community subscale. Mediator analysis was conducted to assess significance of the indirect effects of the mediator variables, which were fear, breast cancer knowledge, and isolation.

RESULTS

Community connection was found to be associated with three of the four antecedents, cancer stigma, stress, and spirituality, but not associated with fatalism. Effects were mediated primarily through fear and isolation with isolation as was more dominant of the two mediators. Surprisingly, breast cancer knowledge showed no significant mediator role.

CONCLUSIONS

The importance of isolation and fear as mediators of community connection is highlighted by this research. The study could serve as a model for other researchers seeking to understand connection in ethnic groups and communities.

Riding Trojan Horses from Symbolism to Structural Change

Against the backdrop of the historical 2008 presidential election, I discuss the ways that the election of marginalized group members to public office can be used to silence the discourse on the social marginalization of group members and to remove these analyses from their appropriate context. I emphasize the need to materialize alternatives to the dominant cultural narrative as one way of contextualizing the behavior of marginalized group members, specifically African Americans, regarding their appropriate angry responses to their marginalization. The toxic effects of racism in the lives of African Americans are trivialized when we ignore their narratives and the social contexts of their behavior. Accurate explorations of social contexts require an explicit examination of social inequity and not just individual responsibility. I use the discussion of these phenomena to highlight an important aspect of the social context in which Black men become fathers and what happens when we understand their behavior as fathers within this social context as opposed to in isolation. My goal is to raise our consciousness about how ignoring social contexts reinforces dominant cultural stereotypes of Black men that vilify them, specifically in their role as fathers, and how in doing so they reinforce the racial, gender, heterosexist, and socioeconomic class social status quo.