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Assistant Professor Kristen Brock-Petroshius, PhD, MSW, received one of 29 research grants furnished by the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) this year.
Through RSF’s Social, Political, and Economic Inequality research program, Dr. Brock-Petroshius and Neil Lewis and Jeff Niederdeppe of Cornell University will evaluate class- and race-based messaging strategies to assess their effectiveness and better understand how racialized policy issues are communicated.
The trio will examine the effects of race, class, and combined race-and-class messaging strategies in the context of differentially racialized policies to address income and wealth inequality – domains with large, well-documented racial group differences in the United States – while advancing methods of discussing race and effectively building support for racial equity.
Additionally, the project seeks to unpack the psychological mechanisms driving observed patterns of effects, including group empathy, zero-sum thinking, and systemic causal attributions.
Challenging the Established Framework
“Dominant political advice suggests that explicitly discussing race in policy debates creates public backlash, leading many campaigns to default to ‘race-neutral’ messaging,” said Dr. Brock-Petroshius. “However, this conclusion stems from past studies that relied on brief message cues and overwhelmingly white samples.
“My co-principal investigators and I wanted to challenge this paradigm by empirically testing whether longer-form, nuanced messaging – especially combining race and class – can build support for equity policies across diverse communities without triggering backlash,” she added.
Dr. Brock-Petroshius met Drs. Lewis and Niederdeppe through overlapping research. Dr. Lewis is a behavioral scientist and an associate professor in Cornell’s Department of Communication, and Dr. Niederdeppe is the senior associate dean of faculty and research in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
“We joined forces to address the lack of empirical research testing how different ethnoracial groups respond to distinct policy message frames,” said Dr. Brock-Petroshius. “This project builds upon past research while allowing for a more multifaceted examination of race- and class-based message effects across differentially racialized policy domains.”
RSF was established in 1907 and funds research that improves social and living conditions in the U.S.
