My own identity journey as a Multiracial Chinese and white woman is what inspired my research.”
Courtney Meiling Jones (she/her)
PhD Candidate in the Department of Psychology
Courtney Meiling Jones is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research primarily focuses on racial-ethnic identity development in people with Multiracial backgrounds. Courtney has previously served as a student mentor for Northwestern’s Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP).
How would you describe your research and/or work to a non-academic audience?
I study racial identity development among Multiracial youth and adults in the United States.
What have been some of the most memorable twists and turns of your career?
I majored in psychology in undergrad, and after graduating I went into management consulting for two years before returning to academia. It definitely feels like a past life, but some people joke that they can tell I was in business by the way I run my research meetings. (They insist it's a compliment, but who knows!)
Tell us what inspired your research and/or work.
My own identity journey as a Multiracial Chinese and white woman is what inspired my research. I realized that stories like mine and many of my family members and friends were not well represented in psychology, limiting our field's understanding of how to support healthy identity development and mental wellbeing in Multiracial people. Since experiencing Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests simultaneously in my first year of graduate school, I also became interested in how Multiracial people’s identities are implicated in their experiences of, and decisions to engage in, social justice movements.
How do you unwind after a long day?
I have a couple of rotating hobbies that I reach for. Right now my go-to is crocheting a sweater while watching "Building off the Grid," which follows people who build self-sustaining homes in the wilderness. Did you know that straw bales are highly effective as home insulation?
Tell us about a time when things did not go as you planned, what did you learn?
I'm a predominantly qualitative researcher, but in my third year I started to tackle a quantitative project. Because psychology prizes quantitative research so highly, I felt that I had to figure out the analysis on my own in order to be a "good" psychology graduate student. I ended up getting absolutely stuck for weeks and started to doubt whether I actually belonged in a PhD program.
What I learned actually came from my PhD advisor, who told me that nobody can be an expert in every area---you become an expert in what is important to you and your work, and you can ask your research community for help with everything else. Now I always approach projects as a potential site of collaboration rather than something I need to tackle completely solo; not only has this helped me learn a lot of new skills, but it has also helped me strengthen my relationships with fellow researchers/friends.
What are you most proud of in your career to date?
In summer 2023, I mentored an undergraduate student in Northwestern's Summer Research Opportunity Program. During a chat near the end of the program, she confided that she had started the summer feeling pretty skeptical about psychology as a field, thinking that she wouldn't be able to pursue work on racial identity, racism, and immigration that she found personally meaningful. But she said her research that summer changed her mind, showing her that you could, in fact, do that kind of work in psychology. She starts her PhD studies this fall.
Publish Date: September 10, 2024
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