Justice beliefs for self and others: Associations with positive and negative affectivity in African Americans and White Americans.

Prior research has shown that a belief in personal justice (i.e., justice for self) is associated with better health and well-being, whereas a belief in justice more generally (i.e., justice for others) is unrelated. However, an emerging perspective is that racial differences may overlay the relationships between multidimensional beliefs about justice and indices of well-being. This includes that well-being among African Americans may be additionally supported by rejecting rather than endorsing some forms of believing in justice. In the present study, we consider racial similarities and differences in the links between beliefs about justice for self and others and emotional well-being. African Americans (N = 117) and White Americans (N = 188) completed measures of beliefs about justice for self and others, and also measures of dispositional tendencies towards experiencing positive and negative emotion (i.e., positive and negative affectivity). In both groups, beliefs about justice for the self were associated with greater positive affect and reduced negative affect. However, beliefs about justice for others were additionally associated with greater negative affect only among African Americans. The link between justice for others and negative affect among African Americans was not attributable to measurement or mean differences in justice beliefs across racial groups, or to socioeconomic differences. Results align with an emerging perspective that simultaneously endorsing and rejecting justice beliefs may be vital to preserving well-being for some racial minorities.

A Hybrid Pragmatic and Factorial Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial for an Anti-racist, Multilevel Intervention to Improve Mental Health Equity in High Schools.

Systemic racism is pervasive in US society and disproportionately limits opportunities for education, work, and health for historically marginalized and minoritized racial and ethnic groups, making it an urgent issue of social justice. Because systemic racism is a social determinant of health prevalent across multiple social and institutional structures, it requires multilevel intervention approaches using effective designs and analytic methods to measure and evaluate outcomes. Racism is a fundamental cause of poor health outcomes, including mental health outcomes; thus, mental health services and programs that address racism and discrimination are key to promoting positive mental health of racial and ethnic minority youth. While multilevel interventions are well-suited for improving outcomes like youth mental health disparities, their evaluation poses unique methodological challenges, requiring specialized design and analytic approaches. There has been limited methodological guidance provided to researchers on how to test multilevel interventions using approaches that balance methodological rigor, practicality, and acceptability across stakeholder groups, especially within communities most affected by systemic racism. This paper addresses this gap by providing an example of how to rigorously evaluate a hypothetical, theoretically based, multilevel intervention promoting mental health equity in three US school systems using an anti-racist approach intervening at the macro- (i.e., school system), meso- (i.e., school), and micro- (i.e., family and student) levels to improve mental health in adolescents. We describe the design, sample size considerations, and analytic methods to comprehensively evaluate its effectiveness while exploring the extent to which the components interact synergistically to improve outcomes. The methodological approach proposed can be adapted to other multilevel interventions that include strategies addressing macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of influence.