Alexandra Knell and Dr. Timothy B. Smith, Counseling Psychology Special Education Department
Experiences of racism adversely influence multiple aspects of psychological well-being, and individuals vary in their successful coping to mitigate those consequences. Recent research (van Dyk, 2008) has suggested religiosity and inter-racial forgiveness as two positive ways of coping, and my project will address the following question: “To what degree does forgiveness mediate spirituality and perceived racism separately as a buffer against the adverse effects on personal well-being?” It is my hypothesis that inter-racial forgiveness and spirituality will mediate the association of experiences of racism with psychological well-being of South Africans who report having experienced racism across their lives.
Participants were a convenience sample recruited from three locations: Cape Town, Sandton, and the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. The participants recruited from Cape Town and Sandton were approached on the street in public areas and asked to participate in a brief survey. Participants recruited from the University of Johannesburg were students in an introductory psychology course who were emailed by the professor an anonymous survey link as an extra credit opportunity. The main criterion for participating in the study is that the participant was currently living in South Africa and from the continent of Africa. Approval for the study was obtained through Brigham Young University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) on April 3, 2013. Informed consent was obtained through a statement of informed consent.
Participants were given a battery of surveys which consisted of a demographics page and scales to measure well-being, spirituality, racism, and forgiveness. The order of the scales was randomly mixed up for each participant. Statistical analyses were run using the statistical software package SPSS. Initially, frequencies, distributions, means, and correlations were run on the data to examine demographic information. Second, two partially mediated regression models were run separated by racial category.
In order to analyze the degree to which forgiveness mediated the association of racism and spirituality with psychological well-being, two partial regression models were conducted. Separate models were used because the measure of spirituality was unrelated to the measure of racism in this study (r = -.069). The first model consisted of: Spirituality – Forgiveness – Well-being with the first two being independent variables and the latter being the dependent variable. The second model was: Racism – Forgiveness – Well-being (with racism and forgiveness being the independent variables while well-being is the dependent). This is not a fully mediated model as it did not matter if racism, forgiveness, and spirituality impacted well-being independently.
Both experiences of racism and spirituality were significantly different by race (F(5,563) = 3.438, p = .005; F(5,555) = 5.776, p < .001 respectively). Specifically, Whites had the highest level of well-being (M = 27.59), Indians had the highest level of spirituality (M = 57.58), Blacks/Africans had the highest level of perceived racism M = 42.04), and Coloureds experienced the greatest amount of forgiveness (M = 37.9). Overall, these differences across race indicated that separate regression models should be conducted across race.
Among the Black/African participants forgiveness was important in explaining well-being and even slightly more important than the variables of spirituality and experiences with racism, although both of those retained a positive direct influence on wellbeing after accounting for the role of forgiveness. For Coloureds, forgiveness explained most of the relationship with well-being, rather than spirituality and experiences of racism. Among the White participants, in both partial regressions the variance in well-being was independent of the variables of forgiveness, spirituality, and experiences of racism. For the Indians, forgiveness played a more important role in well-being than did experiences of racism.
In several of the analyses, forgiveness seems to explain part of the relationship that spirituality has with psychological well-being and vice versa. In almost all the racial groups, the degree to which spirituality was associated with well-being diminished in the presence of forgiveness. This finding could possibly be attributable to some construct overlap between these two measures, which hypothesis was supported by a closer inspection of the items on the measurement scales that confirmed construct overlap. In the Forgiveness Scale there is a question that states: “I pray for the person who wronged me” which clearly has religious implications.
In addition, for the Coloured participants forgiveness reduces the negative impact of racism on psychological well-being which has huge implications. Furthermore, as compared to other racial groups the Coloureds had a huge decrease in spirituality due to forgiveness. These findings indicate that for the Coloureds forgiveness has a significant healing effect and can be used to improve psychological well-being. Perhaps the unique social experiences that Coloureds face in a racially charged South Africa impact their openness to the positive effects of forgiveness. Whatever social or environmental factors that caused the etiology of the change, the results indicate that the effects of forgiveness were strongest for the Coloureds.
Surprisingly, for the Indians the presence of forgiveness increased the negative relationship racism has with psychological well-being. Due to the nature of the study additional questions that could have clarified this puzzling result were not present and so we are simply left to speculation on why this occurred. One possibility is that the Indian population who did not forgive were at greater risk for decreased well-being.
The first research hypothesis sought to use forgiveness as a tool to explain the relationship between spirituality and well-being and improve one’s well-being. With regards to this hypothesis, forgiveness consistently proved to be a moderate tool in improving one’s well-being. Some of this influence, however, may be due to overlapping constructs with spirituality. The second research hypothesis attempted to examine the effect forgiveness could have in reducing the negative effects of racism on well-being. It was hypothesized that in the presence of forgiveness, the strength of racism would decrease substantially for all racial groups. The hypothesis was only concretely supported with the Coloured participants.
In the current study the Coloured participants in South Africa responded the strongest to measures of forgiveness. More research is needed to replicate these findings as well as determine if they are similar to the United States. Furthermore, additional research is needed to understand why the mechanism of forgiveness worked in Coloureds and not among other racial groups. Considerable additional research is needed in order to better understand the intersecting roles of spirituality, forgiveness, racism, and well-being with regards to improving one’s well-being.