Goodbye to Stereotypes – Designing Research That is Effective, Fair and Empowering

Research can play a powerful role in giving lesser-heard groups a platform to represent themselves. This also has significant benefits for research buyers, enabling commercial and public organizations to better serve minority groups.  

This training session will help you address biases and blind spots, along with offering guidance on research design that will enable you to achieve valid and effective results.

Too often, we do not have a holistic understanding of minority groups, due to factors such as lack of interaction, representation in media or visibility in prominent positions within culture and society. This can lead to misunderstandings and, sadly, the perpetuation of restrictive, and often harmful, stereotypes.

Research can help to bridge the knowledge gap, however its potential is often untapped. There are a number of reasons for this which we will look at in detail, including challenges in accessing minority audiences through traditional research recruitment approaches; audiences may, understandably, be less familiar or comfortable with research; potentially needing to employ a range of data collection methods and practices to ensure the research is inclusive and therefore representative (e.g. translations, ethnic matching, online and offline options). The need for more tailored approaches can increase barriers to conducting (effective) research with lesser-heard audiences, thus diminishing the likelihood of it taking place. For example, some may be concerned about the potential need for additional time or budget relative to what they are used to, or even be under-confident in their ability to successfully deliver the project.

Thankfully researching minority audiences is starting to become more common, with improvements in access, guidance and a general shift towards inclusivity. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Market Research Society (MRS) are very much leading the way. The ONS has recently published recommendations from its Inclusive Data Taskforce report, which the MRS’s Representation in Research Steering Group is implementing, along with other initiatives to ensure that research projects in the UK carefully consider and reflect the distribution of the national population.  

The aim of this training session is to ensure that research takes into consideration the diversity of the UK population, or any given target audience, and is inclusive of groups that are increasing in size as well as those who have historically been underrepresented. We will look in particular detail at racial, ethnic and religious minority groups, and will also have specific sections on minorities in relation to gender identity, sexual orientation and physical and mental health conditions.

What you’ll learn:

The course will cover:

• Why it is important to fairly represent minority groups in research
• Considerations in relation to ethics, validity and reliability when designing research (e.g. sampling, data collection methodologies, question wording)
• Current gaps and challenges in relation to executing research with minority groups well
• Best practices to navigate current gaps and challenges, as well as future improvements that are on the horizon
• Inspiration through examples of successful and beneficial projects!

Who this is for: 

There is no one size fits all approach for researching minority groups, plus there will always be things we don’t know we don’t know. Our aim is therefore to equip researchers with a broad approach, along with knowledge, tips and inspiration to help them better navigate the process. We hope that by the end of the course researchers feel more confident and empowered when it comes to conducting inclusive research.