“I Can Thrive Under Most Conditions but, I’d Much Rather Thrive in Love:” Utilizing Psychological Thriving and Black Consciousness to Create the Radical Healing Inventory (RHI)

Abstract

The adversity of experiencing heightened levels of stress due to racism and discrimination is well documented in the literature. More recently, new psychological models related to healing from such adversities have been explored. This conceptual article sought to briefly explore the rationale for establishing a healing framework, examines the five components of the psychological framework of radical healing (i.e., collectivism, radical hope, strength and resistance, critical consciousness, and cultural understanding and self-knowledge) and integrates this framework with a previously established construct, psychological thriving. A quantitative study approach is used to propose a valid and reliable scale that can be utilized to measure radical healing amongst Black people through the lens of two primary constructs: psychological thriving and Black consciousness. In the first study, the Thriving Scale and the Scale of Black Consciousness were combined to create the Radical Healing Inventory (RHI). In the second study, the reliability of this measure was confirmed in an independent sample of Black individuals. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used along with bivariate Pearson correlation coefficients.