Dina Shapiro receives fellowship from Wharton

Dina Shapiro

Doctoral student Dina Shapiro has received the Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship Award for 2011 from the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. Her research project, “What will people think of Me? Measuring the anticipated risk of disease related stigma,” will receive funding support from Wharton in the coming year.

The Fellowships provide funding for doctoral research on human decision making. The research fellowships are named in honor of an endowment provided to the Wharton School by the Anheuser-Busch Charitable Trust.  Russell Ackoff, Professor Emeritus of Management Science life's work was dedicated to furthering the understanding of human behavior in organizations.  It is in the spirit of continuing this legacy by supporting doctoral training that the fellowships have been named.

 

Ms. Shapiro is the fourth Annenberg doctoral student to win this award in recent years. In 2010 Annenberg doctoral students Cabral Bigman and Peter Busse were recipients of this honor. Shawnika Hull (Gr '10) won in 2009 and 2008.

About her research:

Although the stigmatizing aspects of diseases such as leprosy, HIV/AIDS, mental illness, and obesity are widely acknowledged, little attention has been paid to quantifying the impact of the anticipated risk of being labeled with a stigmatized disease on health-related behaviors. However, just as do considerations of the physical risk for a disease, the risk of the negative consequences associated with having a stigmatized disease can influence intentions to engage in health-related behaviors. To date, no scale focusing on this construct has been developed and tested for its psychometric properties. Thus, the objective of this study is the construction and validation of a multiple-item scale which produces reliable and valid data for the measurement of the latent construct ‘anticipated stigma’. Once assessed and validated, the final scale should prove useful for researchers who are interested in encouraging or preventing behaviors which are associated with stigmatized diseases.