Week 3 RF-How do we meaningfully conduct health research cross culturally? Flashcards
Cultural sensitivity involves what two types of sensitivity?
- Surface structure
-Does the research fit within a given culture? (i.e., is it culturally sensitive?) top-down approach. - Deep structure
-How will participants think about and respond to certain elements of research? bottom-up approach (allows more input from participants).
What are the three types of cross-cultural research?
- Psychological method validation
- Indigenous cultural studies
- Comparative research
What is Psychological method validation?
-Used to identify if psychological
measures/tests are applicable and
generalisable to the population.
-If similar results are found across cultures, then validity and reliability can be assumed.
- E.g. Fallon et al. PSAS work (measures postpartum-specific anxieties originally tested in the UK and now across different areas of the world to test its relevance to other cultures excluding the UK as this is what it was originally designed for).
What are Indigenous cultural studies?
- Study of minority ethnic groups who live in their native location.
- Indigenous populations compared to people from other countries.
- Can findings be extrapolated to other cultures? (i.e., generalisation)
- E.g. Rowan et al., (2014) (looked at interventions targeted at Indigenous people to treat addiction seeing whether it could be extrapolated out or not).
What is Comparative research?
- Compares the findings of two or
more countries. - Often used to identify similarities
and differences between cultures. - E.g. van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg (1988) (compared 8 countries and found more economically developed countries had a higher prevalence of insecure-avoidant attachment styles whereas less economically developed had more insecure ambivalent types).
What are the benefits of cross-cultural research across the lifespan?
■To advance knowledge beyond our own cultural context (more robust and reliable)
■Reduces bias especially from researcher and the research process
■Understand human behaviour
■Diverse populations (promoting diversity in our samples)
■Cost-effective, aiming to help those at highest risk of poor health outcomes
■Moral responsibility for countries with lower incomes (e.g., facilitate and collaborate with universities in lower economic areas of the world)
■Globalisation (the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide)
What are some things to think about with different populations?
■Global - low/middle/high income country
■UK - ethnic minority (i.e., ethnic density)
■Age - what part of the lifespan
■Health - mental health or physical?
What are some considerations in cross-cultural research?
■ Cultural sensitivity, ensuring Western understandings are not imposed
■ Funding for different countries (e.g. GCRF who funded an investigation looking at low cost tools for assessing dementia in low and middle income countries as not everywhere has access to brain scanners)
■ Low/middle income countries - UN/WHO health priorities (gender equalities, human rights, displaced people, water etc).
■ International/national collaborators
■ Fairness- financial provisions and recognition in dissemination
■ Methodologies mean different things to different cultures (i.e., questionnaires in one area of the world may not be relevant to another).
■ Language- interpreters(Huntley et al, 2021; Michaeel, 2021). (to prevent power imbalance and constraints)
■Translating/back-translating (can lose the meaning in translation especially when some words don’t exist in other languages).
■Religion, gender/ethnic matching
(Hussain et al., 2022) (ensures members of the team are best placed to work alongside certain communities)
■Diversity in team (to allow diverse input)
What are some ethical considerations in cross cultural research?
■Recruiting participants ethnically becomes more complex globally: risk of coercion
■Securing comprehensible, properly translated informed consent
■Confidentiality may prove difficult across different legal systems (i.e., different definitions of confidentiality in different countries and cultures).
■Differing conceptions of sensitive topics
■Culturally sensitive analysis and reporting of data
What is meant by ‘Communities as equal partners’
Above all, ethical cross-cultural research requires recognising communities as equal partners, not mere data sources. From first
consultations to disseminating final analyses, maintaining indigenous rights and perspectives proves paramount to ethical engagement.
What is the ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Statement’ from NIHR guidelines?
Every person eligible to take part in research should be offered the same opportunity of taking part in that research. Trainees should demonstrate how these factors have been considered and addressed in their proposal, including steps taken to ensure the research sample is representative of the population the study is targeted at. Trainees need to explain who they are planning to recruit to ensure inclusivity of study participants and justify and explain any exclusions.
PPI- What do we mean by public or service user involvement?
-PPI=Patient & Public Involvement
Involvement - research being carried out ‘with’ or ‘by’ members of the public rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them
Participation – where people take part in a research study (INVOLVE 2012)
- Potential to improve the research relevance and quality
- Involvement as a right (You have to do it)
What do we mean by public? (INVOLVE 2012)
When using the term ‘public’ we include patients, potential patients, carers and people who use health and social care services as well as people from organisations that represent people who use services.
How does PPI include Inclusive Opportunities?
■Offer public opportunities that are
accessible and that reach people and groups according to research needs
■Coproduction- research question, materials, dissemination, plain English (i.e., no language issues) etc.,
■Benefits of PPI work (Saini et al, 2021)
How can we design culturally sensitive research?
- Identify the research area that will be investigated and form a hypotheses/research question
- Choose the appropriate cross-cultural design that will be used
- Identify if research will collect its own data (primary) or use previously published data (secondary)
- Conduct the research
- Complete analysis and report findings
