Supporting Historically Excluded and Marginalized Participants in Research

Author: Mariana Orihuela

This week's Inclusion in Neuroscience topic was focused on learning to support historically excluded and marginalized research participants. To implement effective techniques that will help improve the B-RAD Lab’s work with these populations, the lab read an article about cultural and linguistic adaptations for families of people with disabilities (Sands et al., 2021) and watched a video on research distrust in historically marginalized groups due to previous violations of informed consent. While discussing these resources during our weekly lab meeting, the main themes that emerged were inclusion, language, and trust in research. Lab members mentioned how social media could be used to promote inclusion in research settings. They discussed how displaying participants’ reviews of research labs may increase transparency and verify the trustworthiness of a lab for future participants. Also, maintaining updated websites that clearly describe studies could provide potential participants an opportunity to investigate research labs before contacting a research lab to indicate their interest in study participation. To ensure that people from marginalized groups understand informed consent, cultural and language factors must be considered when recruiting participants from these populations and explaining informed consent; this is another way of establishing and maintaining trust in research. Before ending our discussion, the B-RAD lab agreed that to promote inclusion, they will be careful with their word choices, learn American Sign Language, prioritize reading and citing articles from diverse research teams, be transparent and clear about informed consent, and be considerate of their language tones.