From describing disparities to understanding why disparities exist: Anti‐racist methods to support dental public health research

Abstract

Racism is understudied in the oral health literature at the same time that race is overutilized as an explanatory factor in study design. Social and behavioral methodologies offer conceptual models that can be used to include racism in dental public health questions. In addition, interdisciplinary and mixed methods approaches allow for understanding racism as an underlying cause of social and health disparities and exploring solutions that address historical, institutional, social, political, and economic drivers of oral health inequity, while recognizing the limits of measuring racism quantitatively. In a collective acknowledgement of the limitations of conventional methods, there are new opportunities to explore how qualitative and mixed methods research can serve as drivers for both social justice and health equity, while building and sustaining a diverse research workforce that can better close these disparities and offer antiracist solutions to oral health inequities.

Conceptualizing inequities and oppression in oral health research

“…By interrogating these concepts in the context of the history of a country or lived experiences of populations opens up the possibility for research to be a tool of advancing anti-racism and eliminating oppression. 20 Given that these inequities result from intersecting systems of oppression such as racism and patriarchy-or class hierarchy, nationalism, religiocentrism and so forth-they can be contextualized to understand the social determinants of health better and advance health equity via systems-level changes. [21][22][23] For many groups, oppression is not singular and not merely a matter of racism or caste, 24 for example; it is indeed intersecting.…”

Transforming the field: the role of academic health centers in promoting and sustaining equity based community engaged research

“…With the dual pandemics of COVID and structural racism, which have devastated communities of color and other vulnerable communities, community based participatory research (CBPR) and community engaged research (CEnR) have never been more important for health equity goals (1,2). These two terms have signified a range of strategies for community stakeholders engaging as partners in different stages of the research.…”

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Best Practices for Oral Health Researchers

“…Therefore, recruiting participants at these sites only may bias the data to a subsection of the population of interest, leading to inappropriate conclusions. Researchers must also be mindful in data collection to make sure that we are measuring or assessing the right variables (Fleming et al 2022). Researchers should consider if race/ethnicity as a variable performs useful work in an analytic mode or is a race/ethnicity proxy for racism, and instead, variables to assess racism should be collected.…”