Hello! My name is Ariana Chu, and I am a second-year psychology major on a pre-medical track. I am from South Florida and have lived there my entire life, until moving to Tallahassee. The research topic I chose was an expansion upon the field research I conducted in my freshman year of college for my Research Topics and Genres course. The research was focused on psychiatric patients and how a therapeutic alliance between patients and psychiatric nurses was beneficial to their recovery process. I expanded upon this research due to my interest not only in psychology, but also in the medical field.
The research I am conducting with the IDEA Grant specifically focuses on inpatient hospital workers and how the burnout experienced from their job impacts the level of patient care they deliver. Furthermore, I will be exploring how ethnic minority psychiatric healthcare workers’ diverse backgrounds may impact the therapeutic alliances they form with patients. This includes doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who have one-on-one interactions with the patients and develop strong relationships with them. This study will require 80-100 psychiatric inpatient staff members in order to provide an optimal population to interpret results with. There are three specific factors of burnout that are to be explored in the study: understaffing, stress, and dealing with emotionally taxing work.
Additionally, ethnic minority staff members are evaluated on their ability to form strong interpersonal relationships with patients. From this, we will be able to derive factors that increase the level of burnout in psychiatric healthcare workers and inform our target population. To achieve this, I will be creating a one-time virtual survey containing various psychological scales, multiple-choice, and written-response questions. This will be disseminated to the population of interest. I am currently in the process of drafting an IRB submission and working on recruitment for the study. I will begin this summer with the study being approved, allowing me to start on data collection, organizing, and coding responses as they come in. By the end of June, I hope to conclude data collection and begin the analysis section. Lastly, I will develop the poster presentation for the president’s showcase in the fall.
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