Coping With Racial Discrimination With Collective Power: How Does Bonding And Bridging Social Capital Help Online And Offline?

Featuring an online experiment and content analysis of a research sample of 185 participants with different races/ethnicities, this study investigates how bridging and bonding capital online and offline (a) encourage targets of racial discrimination to seek support, (b) buffer targets' emotional distress, and (c) facilitate assertive coping behaviors. Hierarchical regressions indicate individuals bridging with a wider range of interpersonal networks offline are more likely to seek support than those with fewer bridging ties. Online bonding helps buffer emotional distress when targets perceive the prejudiced acts encountered as less severe. Maintaining connections with diverse people offline also helps targets cope with racial discrimination assertively when the supportive messages received fail to fully validate their feelings. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.