Major: Psychology honours
Year: 3
Home Town: Lopburi, Thailand
Preferred pronouns: he/him
Fun Fact: I have seven cats back home
Could you tell us what your research question and hypothesis were/are?
My research question is the observation of the relationship between a sense of mastery and suicidality among transgender and gender non-conforming youth, especially for Black and people of colour. The sense of mastery, in this case, is about talent or valuable skill. Suicidality, as we know, is suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. So this research isIt’s the correlational relationship between knowing that you are good at something (the sense of mastery) and suicide rates, and then analyzing whether they will have a positive or negative correlation.
What sparked your interest in your research topic?
I would say that this is solely from my lived experience because I’m a transgender, queer man of colour. I’m also a suicide survivor. In my community, a lot of people tend to talk about it but there is little to no research done. My community has high rates of suicide, but it is almost like, the society has established that, but they’re not doing anything. That’s where I come in.
How did you build your hypothesis?
In the beginning, I was not going to do this research, instead, I was going to do a research on dating violence. But then, I was reading this paper on academic achievement. If people are doing well academically, they usually have better mental health quality, suicide rates will be decreased. This made me think of the research question and how if you know that you have a talent and a purpose in your life. It increases the sense of belongingness. I realised that there aren’t any resources that discuss this. Talent that is outside of academia, right? They tend to discuss academic achievement, but they would never talk about talent, for example, artistic talent, or sports. It made me think that if there is research about academic achievement, maybe there’s something there about artistic or athletic talent or something outside of that, too. That’s how I formulated the hypothesis.
What made you feel like this was an important topic to research?
As I mentioned earlier, there’s not enough research. I can speak from my personal experience that the system tends to be here to eradicate the existence of transgender people. The system also tends to make us feel like we are disposable and that they do not care about us. The majority of the research tends to just focus on the majority of the population and leave certain groups of people behind. This is from my personal experience, and also from the gap of knowledge in the research, or in the academia as well, that makes me feel like this is very important because there are so many people out there whose lives are not livable, they’re facing a lot of violence, and it’s just alarming that people don’t pay attention to that. This inspired me to do this research.
Did you have to make any adjustments to your project due to COVID? Did the transition from in-person studies to online studies disrupt your research findings? How did you and your team overcome it?
I am very fortunate as we have run a national survey throughout Canada since 2018. It is solely online-based, which is very lucky.
What was your favourite part of the process?
A lot of people might not like this part, but I like the analysis part. You’re just sitting there with SPSS and creating the scale and then making the summation of the scale, you run the data sets and you see the results. You’ve worked so hard on something and you finally get to see a result that will be significant. For me, this is my favourite part.
Is there anything you can share with us about the results that you found? What trends/conclusions did you observe? What was the most surprising observation from your study?
We did a correlational as well as a qualitative analysis. The results showed us that there is a negative correlation between a sense of mastery and suicidality, which is significant, that’s what we want to see. We’re trying to run the mediation analysis. And to see if there is a relationship between self-esteem and our sense of mastery. For example, if you have a sense of mastery, will your self-esteem increase? But the unfortunate part about this is that we have a lot of missing data. I would not say that it’s robust. The result for a sense of mastery is that self-esteem is not significant. But I have to emphasize that there is a lot of missing data from the samples. From 213 data points, it left me with 50 to 90 data points which is a lot of miss data. There’s a problem with a scale that we’re trying to figure out. Now, I’m doing the qualitative analysis, for the sense of mastery, we ask them to name something you’re good at and let them elaborate on that. I will say 60% of the youth mentioned that they are good at Arts, you know, like drawing, dancing, acting, sketching, etc. It is very interesting to see. And there’s one code that I love – when we ask them to name something that they’re good at, they say, “I am smart and strong and beautiful. I am good at everything.” There is a sense of pride in themselves that they’re trying to, like translating to us. I feel like the qualitative analysis is very rewarding for me at this point.
I will say there is nothing that I didn’t expect. But there is this one thing that I am quite disappointed with, as I mentioned that there is a lot of missing data. When we ran this survey, we didn’t want to pressure the youth to answer every question. It is expected that we will have some missing data. But I didn’t expect that it was going to be this much. As much as I mentioned that I like doing the data analysis part because I want to see the results and figure out what has happened and whether that will support my research question. When I saw a lot of missing data, it made me uncertain if I should conclude the result as significant or not significant as it is not robust.
What will you be doing with your data and conclusion now? How do you plan on presenting it?
Right now, I’m writing my paper. And I’m hoping to present that at PURC, which is coming up for the UBC PSA. I’m still looking at the results and figuring out how I am going to interpret that because when I’m doing the qualitative analysis, the purpose of doing that is actually to celebrate pride of transgender individuals.
I would like to emphasize the effect of the sense of mastery. When the youth mentioned that they’re good at something, I want to understand what they are good at and figure out how we can endorse it. Toward the end, I would like to, perhaps, write some recommendations based on what the youth is good at and how we can inculcate it in the school curriculum and help them move forward from there. That is something that I’m hoping to do.
How do you see the results of your study being applied in the real world?
Although there is support for students in Canadian high schools in terms of academics, sports and arts, this is not intended to include transgender youth. For example, there is a lot of “debate” right now about whether transgender people belong in sports teams. But if a transgender student mentions in school that they are good at sports, there isn’t a support system in place to help them navigate through such topics and hurdles. I feel that there’s a lot that should be paid attention to – it would be a way to save a life. The system in place right now is neglecting transgender youth. As I mentioned earlier regarding my qualitative analysis, I’m hoping to report about the sense of master Canadian transgender youth have and write up some recommendations about what should be done in school and the community.
If you could do your study again, what would you do differently?
I would like to ask participants more questions about, say, how the talent or skill that they mentioned is important to them. I want to dig deep and let them voice themselves. I didn’t have any power to create the questionnaires that were used for data collection, and I find that I want more information. I want to hear the voice of youth more about how they feel, and whether there is anything that they want to see.
What course(s) do you think were most helpful in gaining background knowledge about your research topic and, more generally, facilitating your research?
My research uses an intersectional lens. Intersectionality is a theory that was proposed by Kimberly Crenshaw, who used her experience as a black woman who often faced racialized violence. She proposed this theory because it’s essential to understand how race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, disability, etc intersect in one’s identity. This combination can create a unique experience in society. For example, I’m a queer man of colour with a disability. In society, I’m facing transphobia, queerphobia, racism, minority stress and ableism. An intersectional lens will ask how all of this creates one experience in society.
At UBC there are courses on gender, race, sexuality and justice (GRSJ) – I took GRSJ 100 and 224, which discuss intersectionality. There are also courses on critical studies in sexuality (CSIS) – I took CSIS 301, which is about trans studies.
In these courses, we are using an intersectional lens to understand one’s lived experiences in society – how race, sexuality, gender identity, socioeconomic status impact one person. I’m using that lens and combining it with research in psychology that I learned from courses like PSYC 217. I’m combining these together to further our understanding of transgender people’s lived experiences. Psychology research is very quantitative heavy – we love seeing numbers. But when we study human beings, I think it is more important to listen to their voices and understand their lived experiences, not through a scale or a number, but through their narrative.
How has managing your project helped you grow, both personally and professionally?
When I started in the honours program, I was so scared because of the thesis, the responsibilities, and the thought that I don’t know how to do research. I was extremely overwhelmed. But when I started working with my supervisors and took honours classes, I learned how to conduct research. I also learned how to manage time and be disciplined. We have all these courses we have to take and the thesis along the way, it’s extremely time crunching. In the beginning, we had to do a literature review, which involved a lot of research papers to read. We have to do a lot of presentations and discuss research more – this increased my confidence, and improved my ability to read papers and deliver messages.
Although the honours program can be scary, there’s nothing to be scared of. When you get into honours, you might think that you are the only one who’s scared. But when you start talking to other people, you realize they’re scared too!
Personal Questions
Tell us about how you stay organized and manage your time while doing an honours/DS project. How do you prioritize and motivate yourself?
I have to admit that at the beginning, I did not do well. But I came to realize that I needed to have a clear schedule – knowing what I’m going to do at which time. For example, during a specific time slot on a certain day, I will dedicate myself to coursework for one of my courses, and then after that, I will not touch that anymore. Then during another time slot, I will dedicate my time to lab work since I’m working in 2 other labs.
How do you network within the psychology community, and where have you made your most valuable connections?
I’m the VP of Academics for PSA – this has been a way for me to get to know other psychology students because I run events and have my committee. It’s surprising how I got to know so many more people throughout this year. I also found that most honours students end up taking the same courses, so after class, we would go out to study together and, before omicron, we would still have fun with each other even though we were all stressed about our theses.
What are your other interests outside of Psychology? Are you a part of any clubs or teams?
I used to be a member of the Table Tennis club – I used to play table tennis competitively back in high school. I love reading. In my free time, I like to cook a lot and try out new recipes.
What’s your favourite book?
10 minutes 38 seconds in This Strange World is the book that I’m currently reading. It’s really interesting – it’s about a female sex worker named Leila or as known as Tequila Leila in the book, living in Turkey, who was brutally murdered and left in a dumpster. This book is written as a dedication to the real story of a transgender woman sex worker who was murdered. I would say this is a great book to read.
What are your professional goals and plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in 5 years? 10 years?
I would like to be a clinical counsellor. In 5 years, I would like to be in graduate school and doing my practicum. Hopefully, I can continue the research I’m doing right now that’s dedicated to the transgender population, especially for people of colour.
How has working on this research allowed you to develop soft skills and become a better person/a step closer than who you want to be?
As I mentioned, my research interest is to adopt an intersectional lens to get a better understanding of psychopathology amongst the transgender population. Right now, I’m focusing on suicide more. I would say that this research gives me crucial exposure to whether I like research methodology and everything I’m doing right now. It’s also nice to get to learn about other researchers who are working on this as I work on this project – this makes me hopeful.