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by egli
4460 days ago
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Kentucky is 86% white non-hispanic (the 8th highest percentage in the US), and they still had to pull candidates from outside the state for their initial four subjects. I think it is perfectly reasonable for them to wait until they have a first round of results before expending the effort to expand the inclusiveness of the group. Now that this is out there, others will start trying to reproduce the results and I'm sure we'll see research extend to other demographics. |
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I'm a guy who had the opportunity to attend a Women's College [1]. As a result I'm more aware then most men of things like only including men in a medical study. Since HN is predominantly male, I feel a personal responsibility to highlight such things, because things like gender and ethnic heritage do matter in medical conditions, even conditions that may look very generic in nature (e.g. heart disease or paralysis).
To be clear, my original comment didn't say this particular study should have been conducted with a different sample, I said simply that "it'd be really nice to hear about generalizable research being inclusive of minorities (e.g., 4 Chicana women instead of 4 Caucasian men) earlier in the research process."
[1] Only women were admitted as residential students. There were a myriad of reasons that guys could attend classes. But we were still very outnumbered!
[2] For more than a decade my grandmother complained of what turned out to be primarily female symptoms of heart disease, but her GPs were only aware of the primarily male symptoms. It was only when she visited a emergency room and was treated by a doctor that was cognizant of the differences that she got a proper diagnosis. In the end she died of heart disease, who knows how much longer she would have been with us if heart disease research had been more inclusive earlier on or her doctors were made aware of more recent research.