Equity, diversity, and inclusion in developmental neuroscience: Practical lessons from community-based participatory research

Abstract

Exclusion of racialized minorities in neuroscience directly harms communities and potentially leads to biased prevention and intervention approaches. As magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other neuroscientific techniques offer progressive insights into the neurobiological underpinnings of mental health research agendas, it is incumbent on us as researchers to pay careful attention to issues of diversity and representation as they apply in neuroscience research. Discussions around these issues are based largely on scholarly expert opinion without actually involving the community under study. In contrast, community-engaged approaches, specifically Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), actively involve the population of interest in the research process and require collaboration and trust between community partners and researchers. This paper outlines a community-engaged neuroscience approach for the development of our developmental neuroscience study on mental health outcomes in preadolescent Latina youth. We focus on “positionality” (the multiple social positions researchers and the community members hold) and “reflexivity” (the ways these positions affect the research process) as conceptual tools from social sciences and humanities. We propose that integrating two unique tools: a positionality map and Community Advisory Board (CAB) into a CBPR framework can counter the biases in human neuroscience research by making often invisible–or taken-for-granted power dynamics visible and bolstering equitable participation of diverse communities in scientific research. We discuss the benefits and challenges of incorporating a CBPR method in neuroscience research with an illustrative example of a CAB from our lab, and highlight key generalizable considerations in research design, implementation, and dissemination that we hope are useful for scholars wishing to take similar approaches.

Ethical challenges in the use of digital technologies in psychological science: Introduction to the special issue.

“…Also, Skorburg et al (2024) describe several ways in which participatory research practices can be incorporated in research using digital technologies for natural language processing. We have not seen many calls for participatory research in experimental psychology domains such as cognition and behavioral neuroscience (but see e.g., La Scala et al, 2023). As a caveat, however, community engagement in research is not without its own set of issues to be resolved, probably chiefly at the level of the individual project (e.g., decisions as to who should represent particular communities; Flicker et al, 2007).…”

Pre-scan state anxiety is associated with greater right amygdala-hippocampal response to fearful versus happy faces among trait-anxious Latina girls

“…Although our sample was a non-treatment-seeking community sample, we observed high levels of self-reported trait anxiety. Over 80% of participants met criteria for clinically significant anxiety on the SCARED, underscoring the importance of community-informed anxiety research focused on Latinx youth [ 90 ]. This observation is in line with other research finding high rates of anxiety in Latinx youth [ 91 – 93 ], and Latina girls specifically [ 94 ], relative to other ethnic groups.…”

Caregiver experienced racism, acculturative stress, and political hostility predict anxiety in Latinx families residing in the United States.

“…Third, we focus on a sizable sample of Latinx families and their daughters, a population exhibiting heightened levels of untreated anxiety (Ginsburg & Silverman, 1996;McLaughlin et al, 2007;Varela et al, 2004). Based on our Community Advisory Board testimonies, cultural stressors like racism, acculturative stress, and political hostility were raised as significant concerns of the community from which our sample was recruited (La Scala et al, 2023). Their concerns reflect extant work demonstrating that the Latinx community is subjected to complex and compounding cultural stressors (Schwartz et al, 2015(Schwartz et al, , 2022.…”