Assessing stress in migrants and minorities after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election using hair cortisol

Hi Denny - First of all, thank you for your support! Hair cortisol concentration analysis has never been used to study a political event as we are proposing to do, and we can't promise that the results here will be conclusive or revealing. If we could, it wouldn't be an experiment!

Hi Denny, While hair cortisol has not been used to examine a political event it has been used in other studies. Hair cortisol has been used as an indicator of stress for the last few years, and has on a few occasions been used to look back at the effects of natural disasters: Luo et al. found increased hair cortisol concentrations in victims of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake when compared to non-exposed individuals. O’Brien et al. found that discrimination experiences can lead to elevated hair cortisol in healthy young adults. Hope this answers your question. Thank you so much for your support!!

Thanks for the question! We have created a questionnaire that includes covariates on demographic characteristics, perceived stress, everyday discrimination, and finally, political orientation (based on questions used by Quinnipiac University's polling institute, just up the street!). We'll use this additional information to control for some of these confounders, and we do also have a control group of individuals who are not minorities or migrants.