Session: Life Stressors, Coping Patterns, and Food Insecurity Among Essential Workers of Color during the COVID-19 Pandemic (Society for Social Work and Research 27th Annual Conference - Social Work Science and Complex Problems: Battling Inequities + Building Solutions)

Background and Purpose: COVID-19 has strained many economic sectors while showcasing the nation's reliance on health care workers, delivery employees, grocery store workers, elder care providers, and many others deemed "essential." This designation meant that those individuals working in-person during the pandemic put themselves and their families at higher risk for the virus and other personal and mental health challenges. These essential industries employ disproportionately more people of color, such that the pandemic has been particularly devastating to those workers. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare racial and income inequalities in our society, media reports have largely focused on the coping strategies of locked down middle- and upper-income individuals: parents working from home while supervising children, single people finding companionship via Zoom, and neighborhoods creating evening entertainment in the cul-de-sac. Less attention has been paid to individuals who earn low wages, who are disproportionately people of color, and have had to make critical decisions to both survive and address their families' basic needs. This symposium focuses on essential workers of color and uses qualitative and quantitative data collected between September 2020 and April 2021 to give voice to the experiences and coping patterns of these individuals. Methods: The symposium papers come from a cross sectional, mixed-methods study in which 319 participants completed an on-line quantitative survey covering topics including binge eating, substance use, religious participation, food insecurity, social support, caregiving responsibilities, anxiety (including COVID-related anxiety), and stress. The quantitative sample had a racial/ethnic breakdown of 72.9% African American, 19.1% Native American/Alaskan Native, 7.7% Asian, and 0.3% Other. Half (50.2%) of the sample were Latinx. In addition, 22 African American women, deemed essential workers, participated in semi-structured qualitative interviews that focused on coping narratives and the impact of racism and discrimination. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Results: This symposium presents findings from four papers. Paper 1 uses qualitative data and analysis to understand coping among essential workers who are women with a focus on navigating the twin pandemics of racism and COVID-19. Papers 2 and 3 use latent class analysis to understand how life stressors and coping behaviors cluster among essential workers of color and how class membership relates to other variables of interest such as substance use and binge eating behaviors as well as demographic characteristics. Paper 4 uses structural equation modeling to examine the relationship between food insecurity, COVID-19 anxiety, and perceived stress and binge eating for essential workers of color. Implications: The findings expose experiences and coping strategies among a sample of essential workers of color. Specifically, findings provide information on perceived stress, COVID-19 anxiety, COVID-19 exposure, and coping outcomes including substance use and binge eating. We explore differences in coping behaviors by race/ethnicity among this diverse sample. COVID-19 is unlikely to be the last world crisis that asks essential workers to perform under extraordinary stress. Findings from this symposium lay a foundation for intervention development for this critical group of people.