Chapter 6 - Culturally Competent Research PDF

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Notes from Professor Brown's class on Chapter 6 - Culturally Competent Research....

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Chapter 6 - Culturally Competent Research ● Introduction ● Recruiting and retaining the participation of minority and oppressed populations in research studies ○ Some prospective participants can get turned off by culturally insensitive informed consent procedures ○ Another barrier pertains to not knowing where to look for participants ○ Obtain endorsement from community leaders ■ If prospective participants in your study see that it has been endorsed by community leaders whom they respect, their distrust of the researchers or skepticism about value of research to their community may be alleviated ○ Use culturally sensitive approaches regarding confidentiality ■ For those minority groups that value collective identity, it may not be enough to assure individual confidentiality ○ Employ local community members as research staff ■ If you have adequate funding, you can hire local community members to help locate and recruit prospective participants and obtain their informed consent ○ Provide adequate compensation ■ It’s often advisable to reimburse participants for their time/effort in providing data and for any other ways in which they participate in your research ○ Alleviate transportation and child care barriers ■ Because of high poverty rates in some minority communities, some barriers to recruitment and retention pertain not to cultural issues per se, but to economic difficulties ○ Choose a sensitive and accessible setting ■ If your treatment or data collection sessions are not conducted in the participants’ homes, you should make sure that the choice of setting in which they are conducted is sensitive to participant needs, resources, and concerns ○ Use and train culturally competent interviewers ■ It may seem obvious that this is an important way to recruit and retain minority group participants ■ You can do this by employing members of the local community as your research staff ○ Use bilingual staff ■ If you’re trying to recruit participants from communities where many members have difficulty speaking English, your recruitment staff should be able to communicate in the language with which prospective participants are most comfortable ○ Understand cultural factors influencing participation ○ Use anonymous enrollment with stigmatized populations ○ Use special sampling techniques

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Anonymous enrollment is just one way to identify, engage, and maintain hidden groups in your sample ■ Purposive (judgmental) sampling is one technique ■ Snowball sampling is another technique ■ Disproportionate stratified sampling is another technique ○ Learn where to look ■ Culturally competent researchers have learned not to rely exclusively on traditional agencies as referral sources in seeking to recruit certain minority group participants or members of hidden and stigmatized populations ○ Connect with and nurture referral sources ■ Whether you’re relying on traditional or nontraditional organizations for referrals to your study, your success in securing sufficient referrals from those sources will be enhanced if you have established rapport with the individuals working in them ○ Use frequent and individualized contacts and personal touches ■ Although many techniques discussed so far bear on retention as well as recruitment, much of the discussion has emphasized recruitment more than retention ■ Studies assessing treatment outcome will need to undertake special efforts to retain clients in treatment ○ Use anchor points ■ Making reminder calls and other contacts is not easy if your participants are homeless or residentially transient ■ Anchor points - pieces of information about the various places you may be able to find a particular research participant ○ Use tracking methods ■ If your anchor points include a telephone number, you can use phone tracking ■ You can also use mail tracking, in which you mail reminder notices about impending interviews or ask participants to call in to update any changes in how to contact them ■ You can also use agency tracking, in which you ask service providers or other community agencies whether they’ve been in recent contact with participants you’re unable to locate ■ If your efforts at phone tracking and agency tracking fail, you can resort to field tracking - relevant to research on the homeless ● Involves talking with people on the streets about where to find the participant Culturally competent problem formulation ○ If you want to conduct research on an ethnic minority population, it would behoove you to know quite a bit about that population’s culture ○ Before you begin an investigation, it’s crucial that you’re well read in the literature on the culture of minority or oppressed populations relevant to your study

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In other words, you should develop cultural competence regarding the population you want to include in your study Culturally competent data analysis and reporting ○ Cultural competence can affect how data are analyzed and reported ○ Researchers will not just be interested in whether minority groups differ from the majority group ■ Compare minority groups in data analysis ● It would be culturally insensitive to be concerned only with how minority groups compare to majority groups and not with each other ● Different minority groups differ from the majority groups in different ways Acculturation ○ Culturally competent researchers will also consider the immigration experience and acculturation as factors to include in their research as they study differences between minority and majority populations ○ Acculturation - the process by which a group or individual changes after coming into contact with a majority culture, taking on the language, values, attitudes, and lifestyle preferences of the majority culture Culturally competent measurement ○ Language problems ■ Using bilingual interviewers ■ Translating the measures into the language of the respondents ■ Pretesting the measures in dry runs to see if they are understood as intended ■ Back-translation - a method aimed at attaining translation validity that begins with a bilingual person translating an instrument to a target language, followed by another bilingual person translating it from the target language back to the original language (without seeing the original version of the instrument). Then the original instrument is compared to the back-translated version, and items with discrepancies are modified further ○ Cultural bias ■ Measurement procedure has a cultural bias when it is administered to a minority culture without adjusting for the ways in which the minority culture’s unique values, attitudes, lifestyles, or limited opportunities alter the accuracy or meaning of what is really being measured ○ Measurement equivalence ■ All steps recommended for developing culturally competent measurements won’t guarantee a measurement instrument that appeared to be valid will be valid with another culture ■ Measurement equivalence - an attribute of a measurement procedure developed in one culture when it has the same value and meaning when administered to people in another culture ■ Linguistic equivalence - (also known as translation equivalence) an

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attribute of a measurement instrument attained by translating it and backtranslating it successfully ■ Conceptual equivalence - an attribute of a measurement procedure that has the same meanings across cultures ■ Metric equivalence - an attribute of a measure whose scores are comparable across cultures Assessing measurement equivalence ■ Various procedures can be used to assess the measurement equivalence of an instrument...