Activity Info

Objectives

Understand that diversity and inclusion are fundamental to research methods in many different ways such as:
- who gets to be a researcher?
- who gets studied?
- how do researchers study different demographic factors (e.g., how should researchers ask participants about their identities?)
Understand that psychological research has the potential to both harm and help marginalized groups, and recognize the necessity for caution
understand how diversity and inclusion are interwoven into the topics we have studied throughout the semester, including even abstract principles such as confounds, controlling for variables, etc.
value the importance of considering diversity and inclusion in research that one may conduct in the future

What Students Should Be Able To Do After This Activity
- share what they have learned with others
- be more thoughtful when designing future research
Prerequisite Knowledge
- the topics discussed in these papers connect with many of the topics we discussed across the entire semester
What Students Struggle with
- some of these papers are quite long, and some are quite complex

Different Ways to Do This Activity

We have used these in a variety of ways, and have some additional thoughts for other ways that they could be used. Thus, we are presenting a variety of options.

For all of these options below, consider some introductory text like this:
- This homework assignment focuses on issues of diversity and inclusion in research methods. Rather than requiring you to read a particular paper on one topic, I am providing a wide variety of papers for you to choose one that fits with your interests. Many of these papers are long and complicated - these are more advanced topics that build upon the basic topics that you have already learned about this semester. So for many of these papers you will not have time to read through them entirely in the time that you should allocate to this homework - about 1.5 hours. It is ok if you don't fully understand the paper you are reading - these papers are advanced and make use of terms and ideas from many different fields such as sociology, philosophy, critical race theory, political science and others. I tried to find simpler articles for you to read but have not been successful. I also believe that through this semester you have learned a lot of things that should help you in reading these papers.
One option is to have students read an article and do a brief homework assignment.
- In this assignment you will read through the paper as much as you can and identify 5 nuggets of information that you learned from the paper that changed how you think about research methods. For each one you should identify what you learned and also how it builds upon other topics that we have already talked about in class. For this second part, try to be as specific as possible - don't just mention that it has to do with causality, but be specific like controlling for hidden variables. Or don't just mention that it has to do with ethics, but that it has to do with the specific topic of justice. As you read the papers you should see concepts that we talked about in class. For this assignment, choose a paper that looks interesting to you, and fill out the Word Doc or TopHat..
Another option is to have students read an article and do a more detailed homework assignment. You could also consider having students discuss the articles that they read and their answers to the questions in their small groups in class.
- In this assignment you will read through the paper as much as you can, and answer the questions in the word doc or on TopHat. Here are instructions about what is required to get full credit for this assignment.
- A related option is to have the students discuss the articles in the small groups: In groups, you will discuss the article that you read for homework. If others in your group didn't read the article you read, please briefly summarize it for them and share what you learned. It may help to look over some of the questions that you answered for homework, and talk about some of your answers. As you discuss in your groups, consider the following questions:
  - What did you learn from the article?
  - Did anything surprise you? Did it not surprise you?
  - What does this make you think about research in general?
  - Do you think we should change our research practices to address this issue? How?
  - Did anything relate to prior topics we have covered in class?
  - If your group read multiple different articles, how are they related to each other?
- Many thanks to Ciara Willett, and undergraduate teaching assistants Darin Fields and Isabel Novavich for writing these questions.
Another option is to incorporate these articles into lectures, assignments, or discussions throughout the semester.

List of Papers to Choose From

Articles on Understanding race, intersectionality, and context:
- Racial Inequality in Psychological Research: Trends of the Past and Recommendations for the Future.
  - This article discusses both the role of race in psychology, and that researchers' identity and studying race are connected. It takes an empirical and historical approach looking at 26,000 articles over nearly 50 years. In particular, historically race has been studied fairly little, though that is changing in some parts of psychology, and White editors and White authors tend to study non-white populations less.
  - Questions or see TopHat
- What If Psychology Took Intersectionality Seriously? Changing How Psychologists Think About Participants.
  - This article talks about using intersectionality to think about the demographic profile of participants and to change how researchers think about participants in terms of 1) participants are multidimensional, participants' social group memberships are dynamic, power is part of participants' intersectional positions, and 4) participants' systemic advantage and disadvantage.
  - Questions or see TopHat
- Deracializing Social Statistics: Problems in the Quantification of Race.
  - This article (similar to the one below), argues that it is problematic to use rase as a causal explanation for differences found in studies. This article gets a bit into math at times - so you can skip that part.
  - No Questions Available Yet
- Race as a Bundle of Sticks: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics.
  - This article argues that it is problematic to use race as an explanation for differences found in studies, because for many reasons it doesn't make sense to view race as a cause. Instead they suggest thinking about many different characteristics associated with race such as wealth, religion, skin color, power relations, etc. and to study these to pick apart race. Note that the page count for this article initially seems very long, but the main content is 18 pages.
  - Questions or see TopHat
Articles on Studying diverse populations:
- The Weirdest People In the World.
  - This article introduced the acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) to describe the participants of most psychology studies. It goes on to document many cross-cultural differences in psychological findings, to argue that these participants are a poor group to use to use when arguing for a 'universal' finding. This paper is very long it is in a journal that publishes very long papers, with them many replies, and then a reply from the authors!
  - You only have to read sections 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, and 8 (roughly 15 pages).
  - Questions or see TopHat
- Finding the Hidden Participant: Solutions for Recruiting Hidden, Hard-to-Reach, and Vulnerable Populations.
  - This article is written by a group of graduate students (at the time of writing) who conduct research with populations that are “hidden, hard-to-reach, and/or vulnerable”. The authors discuss the risks that these populations incur with participating in research and many of the barriers to recruitment, as well as some solutions to these issues. The authors also present several examples from their own work, including research on: intimate partner violence, experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual elementary school teachers, and lesbian and gay first-generation immigrants.
  - Questions
- The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing Psychology Through a Distributed Collaborative Network.
  - This article discusses a new organization, the PSA, designed to conduct very large studies across many labs. This can allow for fundamentally different sorts of questions to be studied such as cross-cultural questions, as well as be much more inclusive with regards to both researchers and participants.
  - Questions or see TopHat
Articles on Social Justice and Research Methods:
- Transformative Paradigm: Mixed Methods and Social Justice.
  - This research methods class (and most of psychology) is focused on quantitative (numerical / statistical) methods. However, there is also another tradition called qualitative research that is uses more in sociology and a number of other fields as well as psychology, that focuses more on in-depth interviews, focus groups, and focuses more on understanding a fewer number of individuals in more depth. Another component of qualitative research is recursivity - that the researcher can change the study design or the questions being asked during data collection for each participant, as opposed to just having every participant fill out the same survey or do the same experiment. This wikipedia article gives an overview of qualitative research. The article linked to above talks about mixed methods research - a combination of qualitative and quantitative - and how it can often do a better job of researching topics relevant to social justice.
  - No Questions Available Yet
- Toward best practices in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research: A social justice perspective.
  - This article talks about best practices in methods with regards to cultural competence of the researcher, formulating research questions, selecting the methods, the research team, the relation with participants in terms of power, and gathering, analyzing and reporting the statistics.
  - Questions or see TopHat
- The Underutilization of Community-based Participatory Research in Psychology: A Systematic Review.
  - This article talks about a form of research in which researchers and community stakeholders collaborate to conduct research that meets the community's needs instead of researchers primarily determining what is being studied.
  - Questions or see TopHat
- Do No Harm Guide: Applying Equity Awareness in Data Visualization.
  - This report has suggestions for taking an equity approach in data visualization specifically, and also talks about research more broadly. This report is quite long, but I am only requiring you to read certain sections (so it is roughly the same length as the other papers).
  - For this assignment, you are required to read sections 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 14, and 15 (roughly 13 pages of text).
  - Questions or see TopHat