I’m interested in researching racial disparities in our current healthcare system. I received my undergraduate degree in Biology with the intent to attend PA school. My passions lie in science, research, healthcare, and social justice. I want to use this opportunity to blend all of these passions into one overarching research question.
This summer I conducted research on the Virginia Commission on African American History. The commission board was tasked with thoroughly examining and reforming the Commonwealth’s K-12 curricula, professional development practices, and instructional supports to improve the way African American History is taught in Virginia Schools. Overall, this commission set forth with the mission to ensure that the content taught in Virginia schools is accurate, inclusive, and relatable, and to equip educations with the skills necessary to teach in a culturally responsive manner. The key part of my previous research that I want to focus on is the culturally responsive training that educators in the commonwealth have started and continue to partake in.
As of July 1st, 2021, the ‘Culturally Competent Virginia Educators Bills’, requiring that teacher evaluations include an evaluation of cultural competency went into effect. This Bill requires that “every person seeking initial licensure or renewal of a license with an endorsement in history and social sciences shall complete instruction in African American history, as prescribed by the Board” (Virginia Board of education). It is now required that each school board implements these policies and that they require each teacher and board employee holding a license to complete cultural competency training at least every two years.
I would like to try and connect my summer research project with my passion for healthcare and social justice. I want my research to focus on the cultural competency training that healthcare workers undergo, if any. I also want to investigate how cultural competency training would impact general medical distrust in minority communities. My units of analysis would be policy comparison and healthcare provider and patient surveys.
This is a broad, almost overwhelming, topic, with a number of avenues for study. I’d like to encourage you to bite off a small segment of what you’ve proposed here to develop a narrower approach for your project. It appears that you may wish to use the model of how cultural competencies have been incorporated into teacher licensure as an approach to understanding how medical professionals may (or may not) receive similar training. That initial instinct to find a similar or parallel project is useful, because it can help you focus attention on scope rather than methods.
I believe your unit of analysis will be determined by the temporary and spatial limits of your research. That is, which medical professional where and when would you like to study? For example, if you’d like to study nurses in Virginia, that gives you a (relatively) narrow scope to pursue and helps you determine whether you think you can include policy, provider, and patient data. But even at a statewide level, you’ll be overwhelmed by the multiple education providers, multiple curricula, and multiple standards in place across the state. It may be better to focus on a single medical education provider; doing so would help limit the number of policy documents you’d need to collect and research, and would give you a more manageable pool of providers, and perhaps patients, to interview in surveys.
Within the scope of this course, I think proposing a topic that seeks to review a limited set of curricula for inclusion of cultural competencies. You may find policies, but even if policies aren’t in place, curricula that include cultural competencies are, essentially, requiring cultural competencies to be studied, even if not by policy. Reporting the results of such research within a limited time (last 5 years, for example) and space (Richmond region, for example) would be an adequately focused research project to propose. Your proposal will include a literature review of cultural competencies and their value in training, then propose a project with a step-by-step methodological approach. That would be adequate for this assignment.