Julie Prud'homme

Notice of the Final Oral Examination for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Topic

A Longitudinal Investigation of Risk and Resilience in First-Year Sexual Minority Women Undergraduate Students: How Minority Stress and College-Specific Covitality Relate to Positive and Negative Psychosocial Adjustment

Department of Psychology

Date & location

• Tuesday, March 12, 2023
• 9:00 A.M.
• Virtual Defence

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Brianna Turner, Department of Psychology, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
• Dr. Megan Ames, Department of Psychology, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Nathan Lachowsky, School of Public Health and Social Policy, UVic (Outside Member)  

External Examiner

• Dr. Meredith Maroney, Counselling and School Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston  

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Jason Keonhag Lee, Department of Mechanical Engineering, UVic  

Abstract

The first year of university can be especially challenging for sexual minority women (SMW) who, in addition to facing transitional stress, also experience sexual minority stressors because of their sexual orientation and sexual violence because of their gender. Yet, first-year SMW undergraduates remain an understudied population, suggesting significant gaps in our understanding of their lived experiences and psychosocial needs. Accordingly, the overall purpose of the current dissertation, which includes two standalone journal articles, was to understand better SMW students’ experiences with possible risk factors (i.e., minority stressors) and university-based strengths (i.e., college-specific covitality), as well as their associations with negative and positive psychosocial adjustment (i.e., psychological distress, positive wellbeing) throughout their first year of university.
Article 1 sought to identify trajectories of minority stress and psychosocial adjustment across SMW’s first two academic semesters and to examine the unique short-term influence of minority stress on SMW’s psychosocial adjustment during that transitional period. Article 2 explored college-specific covitality, as measured by the College Student Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire (CSSWQ; Renshaw & Bolognino, 2016), and investigated the CSSWQ’s within person and between-persons psychometric
properties in first-year SMW undergraduates. Altogether, this research addressed several gaps in the literature by (a) adding to the scant literature on SMW’s psychosocial needs, (b) extending the study of minority stress in SMW undergraduates, (c) establishing the appropriateness of the CSSWQ for longitudinal use as well as the applicability of the underlying college-student covitality model in a sample of first-year SMW, (d) identifying possible strengths that could be amplified at the university level to encourage more positive psychosocial adjustment in SMW, and ultimately, (e) moving toward a more strengths-based understanding of sexual minorities’ psychosocial adjustment to university.