Best practices for researching diverse groups.

Abstract

The elimination of health and other disparities requires high quality and methodologically sound research on racial/ethnic minorities. Despite a general consensus on the need for valid research on racial/ethnic minorities, few guidelines are available. This article contributes to closing this gap by discussing examples and strategies for addressing concrete issues that researchers may face during these stages of the scientific process: planning and literature review (identifying meaningful gaps and appropriate theoretical perspectives), design (caveats of race-comparison, selection of appropriate terminology), measurement (measurement equivalence, effects of ethnicity of the interviewer/coder), recruitment (barriers and strategies to facilitate recruitment), data analysis (use of norms derived from other groups, hazards of combining ethnic groups in the analyses), and dissemination of study findings to professional and lay audiences. Applying appropriate methodology will result in research that may impact disparities.