Improving psych research methods irt communities of color

June 2, 2020 10:45 AM

I'm an academic clinical psychologist housed in a research center. The rest of the research faculty and I are responding to current events in part by committing to challenging and improving our current research methods in relation to communities of color. We primarily do observational survey research and clinical trials, with some qualitative research. We're looking for resources, readings, and concrete suggestions for reducing racial bias in our research methods.

The other faculty members are mostly academic psychologists of various types- not just clinical. Our research is public health focused and mostly addresses issues related to mental health and substance use in adults.

We're looking for resources around things like assessing race/ethnicity in survey research, identifying our own racist assumptions in our research questions, minimizing the presence of bias in our statistical analyses and manuscripts, ensuring that our sampling approach is reflecting communities of color, etc.

We have also identified some ways to recruit more faculty, staff, and students of color (as we know that having more scholars of color at our table will be part of accomplishing this goal) and use our platform to amplify the work of scholars of color. This question is specifically about resources and strategies to improve our research methods.

posted by quiet coyote to Society & Culture (3 answers total)

I assume you're familiar with Most people are not WEIRD; I've gotten a lot out of combing through the thousand or so articles that cite it and flagging things that seem relevant for some of my work.

The National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine has a variety of resources including access to most of the reports they've issued as a result of workshops as free PDFs. Usually these have a series of recommendations and guidelines (I've used their sexual harassment one to organize workshops and advocate for some change around my university, for example). I'm not sure which keywords would be most relevant for your work, but they have a collection on health equity. I wanted to specifically point out Framing the dialogue on race and ethnicity to advance health equity, Communities in action: pathways to health equity, The culture of our discontent: beyond the medical model of mental illness, and Measuring recovery from substance use or mental disorders.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:24 AM on June 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've heard Heather Krause speak before. It's not specifically about psych research, but she has started We All Count, which is a data equity project. It has some resources which may be helpful.
posted by emsuro at 12:41 PM on June 2, 2020

One thing that might go a long way to eliminating biases would be to look at community participatory methods (like Participatory Action Research). It looks like psych in particular calls it community based participatory research, part of community psychology.
posted by librarylis at 9:50 PM on June 3, 2020