Examining the Relationship Between Minority Status Stress, the Social Change Model of Leadership Development, and Persistence of Black Students at Predominantly White Institutions

Minority status stress, which is the stress Black college students experience at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) as a result of their racial minority status, has been found to negatively impact their persistence in college. Two manuscripts were developed for this dissertation. The first is a critical literature review which establishes the relationship of minority status stress, persistence, and leadership values within psychological and higher educational scholarship of Black students at PWIs. The paper seeks to clarify the connection between the aforementioned variables as it relates to the Black student experience at PWIs. As minority status stress causes a threat to Black student persistence, leadership conceptualized using the values or the Cs of the Social Change Model of Leadership Development (SCM) were introduced as coping methods Black students have used to increase their persistence and minimize the negative effects of minority status stress.

The second article is a quantitative study examining the relationship of minority status stress and persistence employing the Cs of the SCM as mediators in a sample of 340 Black college students. Results indicated that none of the Cs of the SCM fully mediated the relationship between minority status stress and persistence when employed as composite scores. However, when the six individual factors of minority status stress (environmental stressors, race-related stressors, racial-identity stressors, intrapersonal and interpersonal stressors, achievement-related stressors, and minority status stressors) and the 5 factors of persistence (academic and intellectual development, faculty concerns for student development and teaching, interactions with faculty, institutional and goal commitments, and peer group interactions) were employed in a series of multiple mediation analyses with the Cs of the SCM as mediators, there were several instances of full mediation by the Consciousness of Self, Citizenship, and Change values. The findings emphasized the importance of these three values in conceptualizing Black student leadership at PWIs and in understanding the role of leadership in Black student persistence in lieu of minority status stress. Suggestions for future research, implications, and recommendations for student affairs practitioners, other student services providers, faculty, and staff are discussed.