Counseling-Based Research That Benefits Everyone

Black and Latinx people make up 30% of the U.S. population, but account for just 6% of all participants in federally funded clinical trials (Konkel, 2015). Studies have also found that common interventions that are considered “the gold standard” in research tend to be less successful in marginalized communities than in White communities (Peek, 2023). Olivia Wojtowicz found herself wondering why. A doctoral student in the COE’s Counseling Psychology program, Wojtowicz has a passion for counseling-based research. Her research focuses on culturally-responsive approaches to improve intervention outcomes for marginalized individuals and communities.

“My mom is from Ethiopia and my dad is from Poland,” she explains. “So I find myself really interested in many different communities because I experienced so many communities growing up.”

Currently, her broad interests are the Black community, the Latinx community, and American Indian or Indigenous communities. “These three groups are typically not centered in a lot of the research that we see,” she reiterates. 

In her graduate work under Dr. Chris Liang, Wojtowicz is participating in interventions with middle schools in the Lehigh Valley. “The Lehigh Valley has a lot of Latinx communities,” she says. “We go into the schools with a systems level perspective.” Schools are often underfunded, understaffed and overcrowded. Liang’s team looks at interventions that could work for communities in these contexts. “Because it would be very naive to go in and say, ‘Maybe you guys just need to hire more teachers,’” Wojtowicz explains. “That’s where the cultural responsiveness comes in—and in the Latinx community, love for community is so powerful.” 

This strengths-based approach focuses on the positives that communities embody and how counseling researcher-practitioners can collaborate and help build on those positives. “For example, we are planning an intervention this year for a local middle school that incorporates ideas of liberation psychology into the curriculum,” she explains. “It’s basically raising critical consciousness and empowering students by having them lean into their own communities and identities.”

This intervention includes collaborations with school and district leadership to determine how current strengths can be leveraged to help the community thrive at every level—from students, teachers, leadership, and schools, to the community as a whole.

“Lehigh has helped me to lean into my interest of studying culturally responsive interventions for multiple communities, which is really incredible,” Wojtowicz says. “Chris [Liang] fostered my exploration of what is important to me and what I want to get out of this degree,” she says. “Culturally responsive research is deeply important to me because my family, again, is very diverse—both of my parents immigrated to America a couple of decades ago." This has made work on Liang’s school intervention project especially meaningful. “Being around so many immigrant individuals who feel like they don't fit in, like how Westernized research and clinical practice are  not representative of them, is something that really informed how I got here today,” Wojtowicz continues. “I think that psychology should be for everyone and I want to contribute to that change.”

Aside from her work with Liang, Wojtowicz has worked with Lehigh’s Institute for Indigenous Studies over the past two summers. “That's been an amazing experience,” she says. “And there, I learned about how interventions that were supposed to be for American Indian communities just weren't panning out.” What Wojtowicz heard in her work at the Institute was that many of these interventions were not responsive to the community's needs or beliefs. “Spiritual beliefs are a pivotal aspect of the healing practices in many American Indian communities and how they heal as individuals and collectively,” she explains. 

This led Wojtowicz to conduct a poster session about the role of Native spirituality in overall wellness at the 2024 American Psychological Association (APA) conference in Seattle. “My presentation examined the power of spiritual practice for these communities and recommended incorporating spiritual practices and beliefs into future interventions to make them more culturally responsive,” she says. “That presentation was meant to bring attention to the linking of spirituality, mental wellness and physical wellness for American Indians that I felt was a really important step in creating culturally responsive interventions.”

The response Wojtowicz received at the conference reinforces the need for wider adaptation of a culturally responsive approach. “I had several people say that they never saw anything like this before at an APA conference—the largest annual psychological conference in the world—which was really surprising,” she says. “And I think this really tells the story of how certain communities are really not yet represented in mainstream research.”