Asian Americans are less willing than other racial groups to participate in health research

Abstract

Background:Asian Americans constitute 5% of the U.S. population. Their willingness to participate in research is important to examine because it influences participation rates and the representativeness of study results.Methods:A total of 17,339 community members participated from six diverse Clinical and Translational Award (CTSA) sites. Community members were asked about their willingness to volunteer for eight different types of health research, their expectation of monetary compensation for research participation, their trust in research and researchers, their preferred language to receive health information, and their socio-demographic background. We examined Asian Americans’ willingness to participate in various types of health research studies and compared their perceptions with other racial/ethnic groups (i.e., Asian n = 485; African-American n = 9516; Hispanic/Latino n = 1889; Caucasian n = 4760; and other minority n = 689).Results:Compared to all other racial/ethnic groups, Asian Americans were less willing to participate in all eight types of health research. However, Asian Americans reported a lower amount of fair compensation for research participation than African-Americans and Hispanics/Latinos but were as likely to trust researchers as all other racial/ethnic groups.Conclusion:Asian Americans are less willing to participate in health research than other racial/ethnic groups, and this difference is not due to dissatisfaction with research compensation or lower trust in researchers. Lack of trust in research and language barriers should be addressed to improve representativeness and generalizability of all populations in research.

Comprehensive profiling of Asian and Caucasian meibomian gland secretions reveals similar lipidomic signatures regardless of ethnicity

“…The WE levels in Asian samples, per Lam et al, also differed from those in Caucasian ones, accounting for 25%–43% of all lipids (depending on the publication 26 , 32 ) but was about 41% for Caucasians in our hands 33 . Importantly, all of our earlier studies were conducted with predominantly Caucasian volunteers who represented the local population in Texas—a mix of mostly whites, some Hispanics/Latinos, African-Americans, and just a few Asian participants (note a paper by Liu et al on the topic 61 ). The low number of Asian samples made it impossible to account for the role of ethnicity in meibogenesis.…”

Volunteer Bias and Female Participation in Exercise and Sports Science Research

“…Finally, factors such as age (Sheikh & Mattingly, 1981;Teschke et al, 2010;Van Wieren-de Wijer et al, 2009), race/ethnicity (Braunstein et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2019;Milani et al, 2020;Shavers et al, 2002;Webb et al, 2019;Wendler et al, 2006), time constraints (Markanday et al, 2013;Stuart et al, 2019), and financial compensation (Bentley & Thacker, 2004;Ding et al, 2007;Grady, 2005;Ranjan et al, 2019) sometimes correlate with or impact willingness to participate in research. Future research can examine if these factors also influence participation in specific ESS procedures and if they interact with sex to impact participation.…”

Structural Racism and Immigrant Health in the United States

“…Similarly, the framework indicates the importance of building trust due to threats to safety related to immigration enforcement, especially if participation feels like another form of surveillance. Economic challenges and segregation could also deter participation but innovative strategies for appropriate compensation and community outreach could help counter this (Liu et al, 2019).…”

“…In other words, immigrants are excluded from participating in the very systems that determine who gets studied and why. Research agendas need to both prioritize better recruitment of immigrants and reduce barriers to participating (e.g., language, trust, compensation; Liu et al, 2019). For example, in the last two decades, only 0.17% of the National Institutes of Health budget was dedicated to clinical research projects focused on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander participants (includes nonimmigrant groups; Doàn et al, 2019).…”