More Opportunities for Diversity Exist
You are off to a solid start, but there are a few more opportunities that you could be tapping into to ensure your research and outputs are as inclusive as they need to be.
You have put effort into making your research inclusive however, more work may need to be done to ensure that you’ve also accounted for any of your own cultural biases and assumptions.
NEW! Download IIC’s Standards for Inclusive Research!
UNIVERSAL TRUTHS
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CHECK YOUR BIASES & ASSUMPTIONS AT THE DOOR
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There will always be things that you won't know, or won’t know to ask yourself. Ensuring that your team is diverse will ultimately help to solve for these blind spots.
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Never assume that respondents will voluntarily (or honestly) reveal all of the tensions that exist within the intersectional parts of their identities. Always ensure the right probes and researcher dynamics are in place to promote information sharing in a way that fits the diverse needs of your respondents.
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Never assume that a person of color is as affected, or as impacted by racial trauma as other BIPOC consumers (this includes the BIPOC researchers on your team/client team). Race and identity are complex. The dynamics of American racial tensions are not the dynamics as BIPOCs in other countries. The experiences of minorities and minority immigrants should never be generalized or categorized as the same.
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CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT
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Given the diversity of the new mainstream, no research can be done without integrating cultural context into the process. Without this, your outputs will struggle to maintain relevancy and will miss opportunities for richer, more nuanced storytelling.
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Always ask yourself, "why is this the case?" and find the historical data, context or BIPOC subject matter expert to back up and support your insights.
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TELL THE STORY CORRECTLY
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Always interrogate your story tellers. Research is often commissioned based on vendor-client relationships, and not on capability. If your research supplier or research team is not diverse enough to support or guide your projects, seek outside BIPOC resources, teams and/or experts to play lead roles in your work - from commission to completion.
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Interrogate your storytelling methods. Utilizing old frameworks and outputs to tell complex, multilayered consumer stories will often fall flat with audiences who may not be able to see the bigger picture. Along with utilizing more BIPOC researchers, creative & dynamic storytelling techniques are encouraged.
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THINGS TO CONSIDER
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Make sure to reexamine your screeners, surveys and overall methodological approach to ensure your project is setup to capture the full breadth of diverse responses from your consumers.
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Ensure & insist that diversity is included in all touchpoints of your projects as much as possible, including the teams who will receive your outputs.
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Ensure that diverse voices & perspectives are present to tell the story of the consumers in your research, especially if your work has a multicultural focus.
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Researching the new mainstream can be expensive, and when budgets get cut, so do opportunities for unique consumer stories & outputs. Make sure to push for, and insist on budgets that can guarantee the necessary over recruitment and readable base sizes to yield relevant solutions and truly accurate recommendations.
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If your project is not focused on multicultural consumers, continue to interrogate your findings to see if there are any nuanced stories that may stand out on their own based on consumers' identity (race, ethnicity, cultural background, life experiences, disability, acculturation, sexual or gender identity), a part from the mainstream findings and then investigate those stories.