Ethnic Minority Research Advisory Group

Key groups of people are at risk of being excluded from participation in research and addressing such exclusion requires action on the part of researchers.

Our work is governed by four guiding principles:

• To understand how other people feel, their culture, language needs, and choice so we can interact with them.
• To prioritise the development of a sustained relationship with key community groups for long-term collaboration to ensure more inclusive research.
• A ‘bottom up’ approach is needed to ensure the development of trusting relationships that can promote participatory research that meets the needs of ethnic minority communities.
• Researching with communities rather than researching on them, to ensure inclusivity, and research that reflects their views, experiences, and needs.

EMRAG works to address the inequalities in research by undertaking research in, and with, black and minority ethnic and seldom heard communities.

We do this by developing and sustaining relationships with communities for long-term collaboration and directly seeking their views on the barriers and facilitators to their engagement in research.

Researchers need to be more aware of the inequalities that exist within our communities and how these shape the experiences and perspectives of people. These should drive our research agenda. At the same time, how people from Black and Minority Ethnic groups might be recruited into research studies may also be problematic. A study examining the impact of Covid 19 on people with learning disabilities in UK, for example, found it extremely difficult to recruit participants from black and minority ethnic minority communities, despite a desire to do so.

These key challenges should not impede developing focused and inclusive research. It is time to critically appraise and to examine the barriers and facilitators to improved ethnic minority communities’ participation in research.

• Current PhD project: compassionate care for people from ethnic minority backgrounds: What is it and how can it be applied in social settings?
• Current Masters by Research (MRes) project: Building Voices and Engagement: Racialised Family/Relative Carer’s Perspectives for Post-Pandemic Recovery (Wales).
• Book Chapter: For the book ‘Equality Diversity and Inclusinveness in Research and Research Ethics: Communities of Practice’.

The Group has been working strategically to address community needs at organisational, operational, and grassroot levels to strengthen collaboration between the University and ethnic minority communities.

We aim to work closely and collaboratively with key community groups to understand their needs, identify priority areas for joint research, and build community research capacity.

We are continuing to explore more community-based ideas to make research more relevant and make real impact on local communities.