Reimagining Social Media to Design Culturally Congruent Care for Black Women

Background and Purpose: Despite systemic failures of our current mental health structures, Black women are leveraging the power of social media to fill in the gaping holes left by social policies, intervention strategies, and therapeutic approaches that are culturally incongruent with their lived experiences and sociopolitical realities. As Black women continue to reimagine social media in order to center collective wellness, self-care, and healing, scholars and clinicians are presented with a unique opportunity to examine how these community-fostered, seemingly informal uses of social media might inform how we conceptualize and design culturally congruent mental health care for Black women and historically marginalized populations, more broadly. The purpose of this study is to decenter Western approaches to mental health care and highlight the cultural expertise of Black women in order to explore how social media might be effectively leveraged to create culturally congruent care for Black women in the United States. Specifically, this study aimed to explore how self-identified Black women define and characterize culturally congruent care, as well as, identify what practices and settings are most effective for engaging this type of care. This study assumes a specific focus on care practices and care settings that exist on social media.

Methods: This study leveraged data gathered during in-depth focus group interviews. This study sought to recruit adult participants who self-identified as Black women through convenience and snowball sampling. Data analysis relied on Braun & Clarke’s six-phase reflexive approach to thematic analysis, which emphasizes identifying, analyzing and interpreting patterns of meaning within qualitative data.

Results: Preliminary analyses suggest six emerging themes that highlight the ways Black women define and characterize culturally congruent care: 1) Timeliness; 2) Accessibility; 3) Respite from External Stressors; 4) Self-Definition and Self-Knowledge; and 5) Community and Collectivism. These results also highlight four emerging themes that identify practices Black women leverage to engage culturally congruent care: 1) Dance & Movement; 2) Music & Sound; 3) Narrative Practices; and 4) Collective Practices. Finally, results reveal four prominent settings that support Black women’s ability to engage culturally congruent care. These include: 1) Formal Offline Settings; 2) Informal Offline Settings; 3) Formal Online Settings; and 4) Informal Online Settings.

Conclusions and Implications: What if social media applications provide us with a technology by which to more effectively deliver culturally congruent mental health services to Black women, and historically oppressed populations more broadly? This research highlights the utility of social media platforms toward designing forms of culturally congruent care for Black women that is widely regarded as accessible, timely, and necessary for attuning to one’s emotional and spiritual needs, particularly in the context of ongoing, systemic stressors. Results from this analysis directly inform a community conceptualized definition of culturally congruent care for Black women, as well as, provide insights into what practices and settings are most effective in delivering this form of care. Even more, this research provides early indications of key features that would characterize a social media application Black women designed to best support culturally congruent care.