Roselyn Jose-Ruiz, FCRH ’26, is a psychology major currently working as an undergraduate research assistant in the Burke Health and Wellness Lab. In her work at the lab, Jose-Ruiz assists in researching the prevalence of eating disorders among Latina youth in a project spearheaded by graduate student and PhD candidate Tatyana Bidopia. Bidopia’s research project is currently scheduled to be presented at the National Conference of Eating Disorders later this month.
The Burke Health and Wellness Lab is led by Dr. Natasha Burke and studies eating and weight related disparities in marginalized children and adolescents. The lab is composed of five graduate students and seven undergraduate research assistants, including Jose-Ruiz. Some current and published research includes the effects of cannabis use on disordered eating, the relationship between food insecurity and eating behaviors in adolescents and the relationship between weight-related abuse and disordered eating.
Jose-Ruiz joined the lab during her first-year spring semester in 2023.“I heard about the lab through El Grito, the LatinX society on campus,” Jose-Ruiz explained. “They [the Burke Health and Wellness Lab] were looking for Spanish speakers to help with the interviews and transcript coding and such.”
Jose-Ruiz was intrigued by the opportunity to perform intersectional research — a priority that she wants to pursue in her professional career. “I want to work with diverse communities and cultures,” she noted. “Being able to do research on Latina youth was very interesting.”
In her research, Jose-Ruiz works with interview transcripts and has learned skills such as data coding. Because the research is carried out via interviews with Latina youth, data coding is used to analyze the qualitative information embedded throughout the transcripts.
“We take the transcripts from the interviews, and we have to read through them. And they go through multiple readings. Tatyana, the graduate assistant, looks through them first, she does like her analysis, then she would pass it off to me to look through them. And then she would pass them off to a third lab assistant… Then we select certain parts of the transcript — maybe something stood out, like an example of what a girl brought up [of] comments that she would hear around her household surrounding food or eating habits.”
After the reads and markups, Bidopia works to map out the themes even more concisely. “Once we have all those themes together, Tatyana will take everything [we’ve] said and basically try and make it make more concise themes and topics.”
After completing her bachelor’s, Jose-Ruiz wants to continue working with diverse communities, particularly youth. She aims to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology and provide clinical care.
Jose-Ruiz’s time in Burke’s lab is an experience that helped her immerse herself in and discover her enjoyment of research as a whole.
“[The experience] definitely helped to introduce me into the world of research. Now, I really do like research. I think it’s very interesting… I’m glad that it’s my first experience and I now have that to carry with me.”
