Including Culturally Diverse Samples in Health Research: A Case Study of an Urban Trial of Social Support

Abstract

Procedures can be developed for recruiting people with diverse cultural backgrounds to take part in research. This helps to address the issue of possible bias in generalizing research findings by increasing external validity, and respects the ethic that everyone should have the right to be eligible for inclusion in research.

Overcoming language barriers in community-based research with refugee and migrant populations: options for using bilingual workers

“…All workers recruited had either a health or social service background as they needed to feel comfortable discussing issues around alcohol and other drug use which is a highly sensitive and stigmatised topic for some cultural groups. This, combined with the training they received, was essential to help reduce the chance of interviewers skipping or skirting around certain questions that would be normally uncomfortable to discuss [1,9,27,34]. …”

“…The sample also needed to reflect newly arrived women in the WHFS catchment area. Thus, the research aimed to reflect the population accessing or potentially accessing WHFS programs in order to obtain more meaningful research findings and hence the need to recruit newly arrived women from different source countries, different migration categories and with different life experiences [27]. …”

Development of Complex Interventions in Stroke Care

“…Such interventions may also present ethical difficulties attributable to the requirement that researchers withhold the intervention from some groups/patients. 94,95 For the studies included in this review, a number of novel quasiexperimental methods were used in an attempt to overcome such difficulties, including matched controls, time-lag controls, or 'before and after' studies, with or without qualitative evaluation. 42,44,45,51 However, the MRC framework suggests that these methods are inadequate for evaluating efficacy because nonrandom allocation of participants may lead to bias.…”

Life with a new baby: How do immigrant and Australian‐born women's experiences compare?

“…12 Immigrant women, especially those from non-English-speaking countries are often under-represented in research, largely because of the challenges and high costs of undertaking culturally and linguistically inclusive studies. 13 Nevertheless, in the absence of research focused specifically on immigrant women and their experiences, and despite the obvious limitations of postal surveys conducted in English, large populationbased studies can provide an opportunity to compare the experiences of immigrant and Australian-born women.…”