What advice would you give to ECRs who want to make their research more inclusive?
If you are an ECR wanting to get into this space, you need to think about EDI at the beginning stages of your study design. If your study needs patient and public involvement, then try to involve as many people from diverse backgrounds as you can, to ensure your research is as inclusive as possible.
Did you experience any challenges when conducting your research?
Historically large data sets – which are essential for my project, were not ethnically diverse and funders remained concerned about the quality of the data.
Despite carrying out preliminary work to calculate how many people from diverse backgrounds were in these datasets, funding bodies were still sceptical about how I would answer my research questions.
Thanks to funding from Alzheimer’s Society, I was able to overcome this challenge and go ahead with my research.
I found that datasets had a lot of information about people from different ethnic groups, and where there were gaps in the data, I used techniques to account for the missing data.
The academic journey can have many hurdles, and while it may hurt for a moment, these experiences have made my proposals better and helped me to be a better communicator and researcher.
How did you access datasets from diverse communities?
Finding good and diverse datasets required some perseverance, and it took a couple of months to find datasets with enough people to carry out my study.
The Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) was a great resource as it has datasets from millions of people from diverse backgrounds and is more representative of the UK population than others.
I spent a lot of time searching the internet, networking, and speaking to other colleagues and researchers who were already interested in ethnic minority-related research.
