Internalized racism is a destructive, yet insidious psychological effect of racism. Although it has garnered increased attention in the research and clinical community due to its pervasive impact in racial minority individuals, empirical research on this topic has been limited. At the time of this study, no existing scale captures the key dimensions of internalized racism of Asian Americans. This study attempted to fill this gap by developing a self-report instrument that identified the key dimensions of this psychological construct. Seven hundred and fourteen Asian Americans participated in this study, and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to investigate the factor structure of the scale. Results indicated that the Internalized Racism Scale for Asian Americans (IRSAA) has five factors, which are Endorsement of Negative Stereotypes, Sense of Inferiority, Denial or Minimization of Racism, Emasculation of Asian American Men, and Within-group Discrimination. This dissertation also examines and discusses the evidence of convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity for the IRSAA subscales.

The relation of stigma to help-seeking attitudes and intentions and how these relations differed across cultures for American students, East Asian, and South Asian international students, were the focus of this study. Previous researchers had found that not seeking professional psychological help when needed was prevalent for both American and international students. Stigma has been found to be a salient factor in influencing attitudes of individuals and may prevent individuals from getting the help they need. Both public and self-stigma were utilized to predict attitudes and intentions to seek psychological help in a sample of 806 students. Structural equation modeling analyses were conducted to assess the relationships in how self-stigma, public stigma, attitudes toward counseling and intentions to seek counseling will interplay for American, East Asian and South Asian international students, further expanding on previous help-seeking model (Vogel et al., 2007). Results indicated differences in factor structure of scales for the groups, and new factors were identified. With the new factors derived, different models of help-seeking intentions were established for each group, and distinct relations among the factors were explained. Furthermore, implications for future studies and clinical relevance were highlighted.