The Influence of Racial and Ageist Stereotypes on Future Healthcare Providers’  Recommendations for Breast Cancer Treatments

Victoria Dunsmore Faculty Mentor:  Nicole Petersen Center for Gender Symposium ~ 5:15-6:30pm ~ Heth 22

My poster will be examining the racial and ageist stereotypes that exist among future healthcare providers, and how these stereotypes influence a provider’s recommendation of treatments for breast cancer patients. This poster will be a proposal of the experiment I will be conducting for my thesis. Vignettes will be used to present the participant with a case-study of a hypothetical woman who has undergone a mastectomy. Following the vignette, a questionnaire will be used to see how the participants’ subconscious stereotypes may affect their treatment recommendations for the hypothetical patient. I will be recruiting students from the Nursing and Pre-Med programs from the Radford University campus; their information will be de-identified as to not reveal who responded. I hypothesize that based off past research, the participants will be less likely to recommend breast reconstruction surgery, or sexual therapy, for older, minority patients who underwent a mastectomy; Specifically, participants will be less likely to recommend either reconstructive surgery or sexual therapy, to the vignettes that describe older, Asian-American women, compared to any other minority. This information will be used to help medical training programs bring awareness to diversity and the implicit stereotypes that may coincide with various groups of people. This education will help current, and future, healthcare providers to be more objective when recommending post-op treatments to women who have undergone a mastectomy, due to breast cancer.

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