The Chicago Consortium for Stigma Research is the result of a group of Chicago-area researchers joining together to study the stigma related to mental illness. It is funded in part by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Patrick Corrigan, Professor of Psychiatry at the Illinois Institute of Technology is the Consortium's principal investigator. The CCSR comprises a multi-disciplinary team of experts from psychology, psychiatry, social work, survey research, law, sociology, human development and the humanities. Members of the Consortium are on faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Loyola University, Northern Illinois University, Illinois State University, and the National Opinion Research Center. The CCSR also works with a distinguished group of consultants that are nationally recognized experts in their fields. Additionally, the Consortium has partnered with consumer, advocacy, and community provider groups. The consortium is a group in development and, as such, seeks partners at all levels to advance stigma research. CCSR is dedicated towards understanding the phenomena of stigma, developing and testing models that explain why it occurs, and evaluating strategies that help to diminish its effects. Special focus is on the stigma of mental illness using models developed through basic behavioral research. Social psychologists have more than a 30 year history of theory and methods that examine stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination in social outgroups. The purpose of the CCSR is to bridge the goals of research on mental illness stigma with the strengths of theories and methods developed by social psychology. Although strong experimentally, much of the social psychological research lacks ecological validity. Hence, our work will be grounded in basic principles of field research that will enhance the external validity of our stigma studies. A development plan has been generated for CCSR junior and senior faculty to enhance their research abilities in this area. Faculty research and development is based on four guiding dimensions: (1) experimental rigor versus real-world relevance; (2) individual social cognitive processes versus interaction of processes with power subgroups; (3) examination of stigma phenomenon versus testing stigma change strategies; and (4) examining the causal relationship between stigma (attitudes) and discrimination (behavior).
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