Anika Forde

Graduate Student Scholar, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

Graduate Student Scholar

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Anika is a 3rd year PhD student in Sociology at York University whose research examines how institutional measurement systems shape inequality across health, education, and social mobility. Her current work focuses on the validity of mental health indicators used in national and international health surveillance systems, investigating whether standardized self-rated measures operate equivalently across populations, with particular attention paid to racialized groups.

Drawing on prior research on social capital, educational trajectories, and meaning-making, she analyzes how socially structured reference points shape self-assessment and influence how wellbeing, readiness, and success are evaluated within institutional systems. Through the development and testing of a new framework: Cultural Reference Point Theory (CRPT), she examines how cultural baselines inform evaluation and how ostensibly neutral metrics may reproduce patterned advantage or disadvantage.

Using mixed methods approach, her research contributes to Canadian and international health policy by assessing accuracy, comparability, and equity of population-level monitoring tools with new approaches to better understand what self-assessments are measuring across different population groups. Her broader research investigates how definitions of wellbeing, performance (success and failure), as well as capital structure life trajectories across health, education, and work and the ways in which policy can be informed and have practical application to address these lived realities.

Research Keywords

mental health, social determinants, inequality, measures, culture, evaluation

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