Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol 49, No. 1 - 17

Minoritized RAs
future (Evans et al., 2001; Harper et al., 2011), the unbalanced expectations imposed upon
them reify hierarchical, raced, and gendered leadership norms (Muhr & Sullivan, 2013)
that can make minoritized students feel so isolated or lonely (Hotchkins & Dancy, 2017;
Mollett et al., 2020; Tillapaugh, 2015) that they depart the position (Harper et al., 2011).
Further, students with minoritized identities in undergraduate leadership roles,
like RAs, may be expected to proselytize an institutional diversity message that does
not match their lived experience (Linley, 2018). Additionally, they may be expected to
facilitate dialogues on issues related to social justice and inclusion (Foste & Johnson,
2021; Johnson & Kang, 2006; Roland & Agosto, 2017) as tokenized or hyper-visible
representatives of their identity group (Harper et al., 2011; Roland & Agosto, 2017).
Furthermore, all RAs can and do feel the effects of secondary trauma, especially as
it relates to the crisis response aspects of the position (Hardy & Dodd, 1998; Lynch,
2017; Stoner, 2017). These tendencies for burnout may be heightened for RAs with
minoritized identities who can feel racial battle fatigue (Foste & Johnson, 2021; Smith
et al., 2007), queer battle fatigue (Wozolek et al., 2015), and/or social justice fatigue
(Furr, 2018) because they continually navigate social justice conversations inside and
outside of their residence hall community. While the lived experiences associated with
each identity group based on their minoritized racial, gender, and/or sexual orientation
identities are differently experienced in unique and nuanced ways, these trends synthesized
from current research represent several broad-based experiential and affective
similarities recurring across this literature base.
METHODOLOGY
This qualitative study followed Charmaz's (2014) constructivist grounded theory approach
to account for and represent the lived experiences of college and university students
with minoritized identities serving as RAs. As a methodology, our use of constructivist
grounded theory focused on building conceptual categories aimed to generate a
theory about broader social processes as well as the underlying power mechanisms that
sustain these systems (Charmaz, 2011, 2014). We found that constructivist grounded
theory offered both the flexibility and structure to distinguish variation as well as centralizing
similarities associated with the lived experiences and felt realities of participants in
our study (Kassam et al., 2020). Constructivist grounded theory was especially useful as
a means to centralize study participants' voices in ways that incorporated social justice,
which is both a strength of this methodology (Charmaz, 2011, 2017; Kassam et al., 2020)
and a goal of residence life (Wagner et al., 2019).
Data Collection and Study Participants
We collected data through semi-structured interviews that took place throughout the
2018-19 academic year. Interviews generally lasted for about an hour and were audio
recorded and then transcribed verbatim. In interviews, participants were invited to talk
about (a) the intersections of their personal, social, and RA roles and identities; (b) their
experiences within their residence hall role; and (c) their supervisory relationships. Incorporating
a social justice perspective into the research, we followed an overarching
14 The Journal of College and University Student Housing
Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol 49, No. 1

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