Beliefs About Diversity Trainings: Majority- and Minority-Group Member Perspectives
Open Access
- Author:
- Frasca, Terri
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- June 11, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Stephanie A Shields, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Kisha Shannon Jones, Committee Member
Melvin Michael Mark, Committee Member
Kristin Ann Buss, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- diversity
organizational psychology
race
gender
intersectionality
social psychology
diversity trainings
training - Abstract:
- The goal of the current study was to identify how demographic characteristics affect attendees’ perceptions of the motivations behind diversity trainings as well as their experiences during diversity trainings. Research suggests that majority-group members (e.g., White, heterosexual men) will experience threat and resentment towards trainings, whereas the limited work on minority-group experiences suggests that they will experience tokenism. Mechanical Turk workers (N=200) completed a survey in which they answered both closed and open-ended questions assessing how comfortable they expect to feel during diversity trainings, who they think benefits from diversity trainings, and to what extent they perceive protection against legal liability, pressure to conform to political correctness norms, and a genuine desire to improve diversity at their organization as a motivation to hold the diversity training they attended. Results show that, regardless of group membership, participants believe 1) diversity trainings are held to improve an organization’s diversity climate and protect against legal liability, but not to meet political correctness norms; and 2) all attendees, but especially minorities benefit from trainings. In addition, greater diversity of participants’ training groups was associated with stronger beliefs that each of the three motivations was applicable to their diversity training. Training group diversity also positively predicted perceptions of training efficacy, suggesting a potential expectancy effect. Finally, while identity-related concerns such as tokenism and group status threat were mentioned in qualitative responses, additional exploratory analyses reflected participants’ beliefs that aspects of the training (e.g., number of topics covered, types of exercises used) more strongly influence attendees’ experiences. This study contributes to the mixed findings around the influence of group membership on attendees’ experiences and points to the need for further work to elucidate how membership functions in the training context.