“Why Would You Make a Comment Like That?”: Engaging College Students as Allies through an Evidence-Based Intervention

Background: Women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals often experience subtle acts of prejudice (microaggressions) in college settings, which negatively impacts mental health and academic outcomes (Keels et al., 2017). To help improve campus climate, we developed and implemented a 75-minute theoretically grounded workshop to provide students with evidence-based ally strategies. We hypothesized that participants would be more willing to engage in ally behaviors towards LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color experiencing a microaggression after completing the workshop. In follow-up interviews, we examined attendees’ retention of the workshop. Method: We surveyed 168 workshop attendees about their attitudes and ally behaviors before and after attendance. Three months later, we conducted in-depth interviews with eleven randomly selected participants (nine women; two men). In the interviews, we provided one case study where a nonbinary individual was greeted by another person saying, “hey man!” and, in another, a White male student was shocked when an Afro-Cuban female student received an A+ on a research class midterm. Results: Preliminary results from the pre-post surveys indicate participants felt more confident engaging as an ally and reported more ally behaviors after attending the workshop (small to moderate effect sizes, all pvalues < .05). Across the interviews, participants who connected with the identity of the victim or perpetrator were likely to speak up. In the misgendering scenario, seven out of eleven participants claimed they were unsure if they would intervene during a real situation. However, in the racism and sexism case study, nearly all participants agreed that they would intervene if the situation were real. Conclusion: Given the current targeting of college campuses’ DEI programming, it is critical to foster ally engagement to improve the well-being of marginalized students. This project tested a theoretically informed educational initiative that could be beneficial to other campuses.