Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Training are Highly Suggested
There seem to be a lot of unknowns in your research process.
There may be a need for diversity training for your team to better understand how to setup and think about research in a way that doesn't produce insights and outputs through a restrictive lens, effectively muting diverse consumer narratives. Based on your responses, your research is likely already entrenched in cultural biases which automatically prevents your work from being as inclusive as it needs to be. Contact the IIC team to schedule a diversity consultation below.
Without additional diversity considerations, your project will not yield accurate results.
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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We highly recommend that your organization set up a diversity and inclusion training to better understand how lack of diversity not only impacts your work, and internal processes.
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There may be a need to increase diversity within your organization, your research team or your client's team. Hiring diverse talent may take a while but using outside resources & experts could potentially solve some of the issues you may be running into or, that you may not be aware of.
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Reexamine your screeners, surveys and overall research 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 talent is 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.