Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Psychology; Gender and Sexuality Studies

Project Advisor 1

Elena Kim

Abstract/Artist's Statement

The colonized people are told that their heritage, culture, and ethnicity are inferior to their White Euro-American colonizers. Certain colonized people internalize this inferiority and begin to abandon their native identities to mimic and resemble White people and culture. This phenomenon is called Colonial Mentality and has been studied by decolonial theorists since the 1960s (David, 2013). In 2006, Filipino American Psychologist, EJR David, and his mentor, Sumie Okazaki, developed a model for Colonial Mentality in Filipinos. Filipino Colonial Mentality is characterized by being ashamed of Filipino culture, feeling inferior to White people, idolizing American/Spanish culture, discriminating against less-Westernized Filipinos, and making cosmetic choices to meet White beauty standards (David & Okazaki, 2006). It is associated with depression, social isolation, and social anxiety (David, 2013). David & Okazaki (2006) developed the Colonial Mentality Scale to measure these traits in Filipino Americans. Overall the field of psychology has overlooked queer Filipino Americans and this includes research on Colonial Mentality. The goal of this proposed study is to begin diversifying the research on Colonial Mentality by using two methodologies. First, an exploratory qualitative study is proposed to fill the gaps in our knowledge about queer Filipino American experiences and explore queer Filipino American identity and internalized colonialism. This first study will use a constructivist Grounded Theory methodology. Second, the resultant Grounded Theory of Study 1 will be used to develop and validate a queer-inclusive version of the existing Colonial Mentality Scale. This requires testing the new scale for dimensionality, reliability, and validity. The results are expected to propel research on queer Filipino Americans forward and expand the conceptualization of Colonial Mentality.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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