Research Guides: Student Resources for Diverse, Equitable, &amp; Inclusive Research (DEI): Getting Started

What is DEI?

DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, a collection of values, actions, and attitudes all aimed at increasing the representation of people who have been historically marginalized, as well as fostering equality and justice for everyone.

Diversity encompasses all of our different lived experiences and points of view. This includes all genders and sexualities, religions, ethnicities and nationalities, socioeconomic statuses, disabilities, ages, languages, and social values.

Equity is different from equality, in that it recognizes that there continue to be disparities in how people experience the judicial system, the educational system, the workplace, and society at large. It aims to address those disparities by questioning established practices and working to create genuine fairness.

Inclusion, like equity, is about taking action to address exclusion and marginalization. It involves making changes that don't just invite people to the table but help them feel welcome at that table by ensuring that they are heard and that they are part of decision-making processes.

What Does this Mean for Research?

Just as some groups of people have been excluded or marginalized in education, the justice system, and society at large, their voices and experiences have been excluded or marginalized in scholarly research. For example, a lot of medical research was based on adult white men as the "default patient." By only studying one group for so many decades, there are significant disparities in how many medical conditions and illnesses are diagnosed and treated. It was only in recent decades that medical researchers learned that heart attack symptoms look different for women, that skin cancer is underdiagnosed for people of color, and many chronic conditions can go undiagnosed for years, among other examples.

When you do research, you have an opportunity to right some of these past wrongs by making sure that your research is as diverse and inclusive as you can make it. You can do this by:

Asking questions about who was included in a survey sample, clinical trial, etc.
Including articles where authors included a wide variety of people in their data.
Seeking out articles that use different types of methodologies (see our guide on research methodology below).
Looking for limitations in scholarly articles to find gaps in representation.

Research Methodologies Guide
An in-depth guide to identifying research methodologies in scholarly works.
Conducting Research through an Anti-Racism Lens
This guide from the University of Minnesota is for students, staff, and faculty who are incorporating an anti-racist lens at all stages of the research life cycle.

Methods That Matter (Ebook) by M. Cameron Hay (Editor)
Publication Date: 2016
To do research that really makes a difference—the authors of this book argue—social scientists need questions and methods that reflect the complexity of the world. For people trained in psychology or sociology, the bias has been toward the former, using surveys and experiments that yield readily comparable numerical results. For people trained in anthropology, it has been toward the latter, using ethnographic observations and interviews that offer richer nuances of meaning but are difficult to compare across societies. Discussing their own endeavors to combine the quantitative with the qualitative, the authors invite readers into a conversation about the best designs and practices of mixed methodologies to stimulate creative ideas and find new pathways of insight.
Invisible Women (Ebook) by Caroline Criado Perez
Publication Date: 2019
Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems.
Science Fictions (Print Book) by Stuart Ritchie
Publication Date: 2020
Science is how we understand the world. Yet failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless - or, worse, badly misleading. Such errors have distorted our knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, physics, nutrition, education, genetics, economics, and the search for extraterrestrial life

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