Is disordered eating triggered by racial trauma? A deeper look on how trauma and gendered racial microaggressions impact eating for Black women depending on coping

Recently, the call has been put forward for body image research to examine the role of Black women’s sociocultural contexts. In the proposed study, Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) Stress and Coping theory, as well as the Sociostructural-Intersectional Body image (SIBI) Framework (Landor et al., 2024), are used to examine how online racial trauma and gendered racial microaggressions of beauty might uniquely lead to body dissatisfaction and loss-of-control over eating in Black women. Given findings of a pilot study conducted in the 2022-2023 academic year, we will look at how coping mediates the impact of the above predictors, with coping self-efficacy moderating the link between discriminatory events and type of coping used. We hypothesize Black women with high efficacy to cope will use problem-solving coping to maintain body appreciation and prevent loss-of-control eating. Black women with low efficacy to cope will instead use avoidant coping leading to greater body dissatisfaction and loss-of-control eating. 150 Black women will be recruited online and asked to complete validated questionnaires assessing each construct. Structural Equation Modeling will test for moderated mediation followed by probing of the hypothesized simple indirect effects. The results could help clinicians understand which coping strategies and appraisals are most effective for Black women, key to empowering them to combat white supremacy as stated in the SIBI model. Although the proposed study has limitations, it combines Stress and Coping Theory with the SIBI framework offering a novel contribution to the body image/eating literature for Black women.