About

Our Mission

Our mission is to call attention to patient perspectives and gain a better understanding of how and why people with mental health needs choose to engage or disengage from care. Issues of trust and self-disclosure are well-established in the literature, and our lab builds on a strong tradition of research by focusing on the experiences of people from minoritized, stigmatized, and vulnerable backgrounds using a range of methods and approaches to gain new insights into how adult patients make these decisions.

Our Values and Research Practices

• Empiricism and PostPositivism: We operate from a largely postpositivist and empiricist research philosophy, acknowledging the value of all research methods within this framework but tend to specialize in quantitative approaches. This means we tend to be interested in objective assessments while acknowledging the role that biases and values play in discovering “objective truths”.
• Cultural Responsiveness: We are committed to going beyond culturally sensitive and competent approaches by staying curious about understanding how culture influences worldview.
• Critical Thinking: We encourage asking questions that promote research and contextualize knowledge.
• Interdisciplinary Collaboration: We recognize the expertise of other disciplines in addressing systemic issues.
• Science Communication: We strive to make our results and research practices accessible within and beyond the scientific research community. Many of our studies can be found pre-registered on OSF, some of our code is made available on GitHub, and we aim to make summaries of our research available in plain-language on this website.