Ongoing Research

Understanding African-American suicide. Suicide is a leading cause of death for young African-American adults. Though patterns for risk differ in important ways for this group relative to others, most studies are not designed to examine racial and ethnic group differences. My conceptualization for African-American suicide (Walker, 2007; Walker, Townley, & Asiamah, 2008) provides a framework for how researchers and clinicians might examine African-American suicide risk in a multidimensional manner. The model illustrates how "universal" risks such as depression/depressive symptoms interact with culturally-relevant buffers such as ethnic identity to affect suicidal ideation, planning, and attempts.

Ethnic groups differences in risk and protective factors for suicide. Much of my scholarly work has focused on suicide and its correlates in multi-ethnic samples toward the primary goal of developing culturally relevant suicide prevention. As an example, we found that self-reported depressive symptoms and suicide ideation were similarly correlated in African-American and European-American college students (Walker et al., 2008). However, intragroup analysis revealed that only certain subgroups of young, depressed, African-Americans-those who reported relatively low ethnic identity and those who reported relatively high acculturative stress-were likely to report having thoughts of suicide. These factors may account, at least in part, for ethnic group differences in suicide deaths and builds an important foundation for developing effective models for suicide prevention.

Sociocultural factors in psychological well-being. My collaborators and I have attempted to explain psychological nuances by examining social and cultural phenomena. Much of our understanding African-American mental health has been left to conjecture. As one example, religiosity is used as a cultural proxy to account for much "unexplained" behavior, including having more "reasons for living" than European Americans. However, my colleagues and I (Walker et al., 2010) specifically examined worldview as one aspect of culture and found that it was a robust predictor for self-reported reasons for living. In ongoing studies, we aim to tease apart the cultural and social factors that best account for psychological disturbance in African-American adults.