Creating safe spaces: An exploration of dominant and subordinate identity status

Through a qualitative study consisting of 68 undergraduate business students representing both dominant and subordinate identities, we examine how students make meaning of situations where they feel “unsafe”. Participants were primed on the increased occurrence of incidents involving negative comments or behavior about diversity on U.S. college campuses. They were then asked to think about a time when they felt unsafe in a diversity-related situation and to describe the situation and how it made them feel. Next, we conducted a grounded theory qualitative analysis to study participant’s explanations of how those unsafe experiences. Our results reveal that feeling unsafe is triggered by norms violations such as repeated offensive behaviors and comments. Furthermore, we find these triggers are interpreted as identity, contextual, vicarious, and hazardous working-condition threats which lead to affective and self-protective responses. Additionally, we found evidence that members of dominant groups reported vicarious and hazardous working condition threats more frequently than members of subordinate identity groups did. We propose that social identity group status influences interpretations of norm violations and how people make meaning about being unsafe. In the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, our results underscore the practical importance of higher education institutions providing concrete action items to address safety inequities on college campuses and beyond.