Modeling Political Ideology, Social Dominance, Critical Consciousness, & Inversive Sexism to Test Measurement, Mediation, Path-Specific Moderation, & Conditional Indirect Effects Among Counselors

Candidate Name: Alessandra Caldwell
Program: Counselor Education & Supervision​​​​​​​
Committee Chair: Dr. Kyle Cox and Dr. Hank Harris
Committee Members:  Dr. Dr. John Culbreth, Dr. Lyndon Abrams, Dr. Tiffany Gallicano
Abstract: Counseling is inseparable from the socio-cultural-political conditions in which it occurs, as political ideologies and attitudinal dispositions affect nearly every facet of public and private at the intrapersonal, community, societal, and global level. This study examined the direct, indirect, and conditional associations between political ideology, social dominance orientation, critical consciousness, and inversive sexism among counselors, using a nonexperimental, cross-sectional design. Data were collected from 1,047 participants across 47 U.S. states. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses tested the best measurement for each construct with subsequent structural equation modeling analyses to examine whether egalitarian, traditionalist, and authoritarian political ideologies were associated with privilege-based and anti-feminist dimensions of inversive sexism through parallel mediators, SDO-Dominance and SDO-Egalitarianism. Path-specific latent interaction models tested whether five facets of critical consciousness moderated the a-paths from political ideology to both social dominance domains and the b-paths from social dominance to each inversive sexism outcome. Conditional indirect effects and indices of moderated mediation were then estimated to determine whether the indirect associations varied across levels of critical consciousness. Situated within a critical queer eco-anarcha-feminist framework and ecofeminism’s four pillars, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and anthropocentrism, this study illustrates implications for counselor education, supervision, and research grounded in political literacy, anti-oppressive praxis, and action-oriented consciousness-raising.