2025 Theses Doctoral

Reimagining Social Media to Design Culturally Congruent Care for Black Women

Allen, Chelsea

Black communities continue to grapple with increased psychological threats due to historic, systemic oppression, and must combat structural barriers that impede their access to mental health care. These threats and barriers manifest differentially and are more pronounced for Black women, who often face providers and institutions incongruent with their cultural values, worldviews, and norms. Black women identify failures in every aspect of mental health care, including social policies that regulate access, norms of care, and therapeutic approaches that are culturally incongruent with their lived experiences and sociopolitical realities. In response, Black communities have increasingly turned to social media to address gaps left by traditional social policies and therapeutic approaches.

This dissertation draws from theoretical frameworks like Radical Healing, Black Psychology, and Intersectionality to advocate for a reimagining of mental health care that better addresses the unique needs of Black communities and, more acutely, Black women. Specifically, this dissertation explores how social media might be most effectively leveraged to develop culturally congruent care (CCC) as conceptualized by Black women. Employing a multi-methodological qualitative research design, this dissertation analyzes digital data in the form of Instagram comments from two popular virtual events centering Black audiences and conducts focus groups with self-identified Black women.

Study One contextualizes the broader landscape of how Black communities, particularly during moments of collective crisis, turn to social media to facilitate connection, self-care, wellness, and healing. Building on these insights, Study Two provides a more focused, population-specific, and participant-driven examination of how Black women specifically define, engage, and sustain CCC across multiple settings, both on and offline. This study addresses critical gaps and offers several theoretical, practical, and empirical implications for social work scholarship by empirically validating existing models of CCC for Black communities, challenging dominant clinical frameworks through culturally specific care practices, and expanding the recognition of social media and emerging technologies as legitimate sites for care and intervention.

By examining the intersection of social media and CCC, this research underscores the potential of digital and virtual platforms as vital tools for fostering healing and wellness, ultimately enhancing the efficacy of mental health interventions. By highlighting the essential features of social media platforms facilitating CCC, this research offers valuable insights into how to improve care for Black women and advance mental health equity for historically marginalized communities more broadly.