Sosa’s Research Leverages Identity to Inform Mental Health Strategies

Raquel Sosa knew she wanted to pursue a career in psychology before she ever set foot on a college campus. A Pennsylvania native, Sosa graduated from East Stroudsburg University (ESU) with her bachelor’s degree in psychology. Several of her ESU professors graduated from Lehigh and encouraged her to look at the psychology programs that Lehigh offers.

“So I knew a bit about Lehigh from those professors,” she says. “And looking at the differences between clinical and counseling psych, counseling psychology definitely attracted me a lot more because of the emphasis on social justice.” Sosa was interested in working with Latinx and immigrant populations which made the COE’s Counseling Psychology doctoral program a good fit for her interests.

“At Lehigh, there are professors who are doing research within the Latinx community and working with local schools,” she says.“My advisor was very interested in working with immigrants and really being involved in the community.” 

During her years of study, she also worked at the Community Voices Clinic (CVC) as a graduate assistant during her studies. The CVC is a school-based mental health clinic operating within the family centers at Donegan Elementary and Broughal Middle school. Sosa started out providing therapy in Spanish and English for families and youth at the elementary school and middle school. As she progressed through her doctoral program, she also supervised other graduate students providing care at the CVC.

“Generally youth are in a stage of their life where they are finding their sense of identity,” Sosa said. “When I think specifically about Latinx youth they have the compounded stress of acculturation and discrimination.” Sosa created a five-session intervention with Latinx middle school students for her dissertation. Her intervention focused on how students can become critically and socially aware of oppression and how this awareness can help improve students’  mental health and help them cope with mental health struggles.

“As part of the intervention, we talked a lot about oppression and what strengths students already had being Latinx, from their families and their culture,” she says. “And then at the end of the intervention we said, ‘Now that we have this knowledge, what's our action plan?’” Sosa’s guidance for the students focused on the actions they can take towards a more positive and hopeful future.

“I found that the students who went through the programming I created had significantly greater psychological well-being than students who didn't receive any treatment when I controlled for school climate, which was a covariate,” she says.

Now in the final year of her doctoral studies, Sosa is completing an internship at Columbia Medical Center in New York City. As part of her internship, she works with clients living in the Washington Heights area. Therapy is conducted both in Spanish and in English. “It’s been a great learning experience and really cool to speak Spanish at work,” she says.

After graduation, Sosa will join the faculty at The College of New Jersey as an assistant professor in psychology. “My plan is to extend the programming I created, which I named ‘Fuerza,’ meaning ‘Strength’ in Spanish,” she says. “I also have experience doing research with existing data sets on the role of school climate and immigrants' mental health and look forward to continuing that line of research, too.”