La Scala Shayna, Mullins Jordan L, Firat Rengin B, Michalska Kalina J
Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, United States.
Front Integr Neurosci. 2023 Mar 16;16:1007249. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2022.1007249. eCollection 2022.
Exclusion of racialized minorities in neuroscience directly harms communities and potentially leads to biased prevention and intervention approaches. As magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other neuroscientific techniques offer progressive insights into the neurobiological underpinnings of mental health research agendas, it is incumbent on us as researchers to pay careful attention to issues of diversity and representation as they apply in neuroscience research. Discussions around these issues are based largely on scholarly expert opinion without actually involving the community under study. In contrast, community-engaged approaches, specifically Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), actively involve the population of interest in the research process and require collaboration and trust between community partners and researchers. This paper outlines a community-engaged neuroscience approach for the development of our developmental neuroscience study on mental health outcomes in preadolescent Latina youth. We focus on "positionality" (the multiple social positions researchers and the community members hold) and "reflexivity" (the ways these positions affect the research process) as conceptual tools from social sciences and humanities. We propose that integrating two unique tools: a positionality map and Community Advisory Board (CAB) into a CBPR framework can counter the biases in human neuroscience research by making often invisible-or taken-for-granted power dynamics visible and bolstering equitable participation of diverse communities in scientific research. We discuss the benefits and challenges of incorporating a CBPR method in neuroscience research with an illustrative example of a CAB from our lab, and highlight key generalizable considerations in research design, implementation, and dissemination that we hope are useful for scholars wishing to take similar approaches.
神经科学中对少数族裔的排斥直接损害了社区，并可能导致有偏见的预防和干预方法。由于磁共振成像（MRI）和其他神经科学技术为心理健康研究议程的神经生物学基础提供了渐进的见解，作为研究人员，我们有责任密切关注多样性和代表性问题在神经科学研究中的应用。围绕这些问题的讨论主要基于学术专家意见，而实际上并未涉及所研究的社区。相比之下，社区参与方法，特别是基于社区的参与性研究（CBPR），积极让感兴趣的人群参与研究过程，并要求社区伙伴和研究人员之间进行合作与信任。本文概述了一种社区参与的神经科学方法，用于开展我们关于青春期前拉丁裔青少年心理健康结果的发育神经科学研究。我们将重点关注“位置性”（研究人员和社区成员所占据的多种社会位置）和“反思性”（这些位置影响研究过程的方式），将其作为来自社会科学和人文科学的概念工具。我们建议将两个独特的工具：位置性地图和社区咨询委员会（CAB）整合到CBPR框架中，可以通过使通常不可见或被视为理所当然的权力动态变得可见，并促进不同社区公平参与科学研究，来对抗人类神经科学研究中的偏见。我们以我们实验室的一个CAB为例，讨论在神经科学研究中纳入CBPR方法的益处和挑战，并强调研究设计、实施和传播中的关键可推广考虑因素，我们希望这些对希望采用类似方法的学者有用。
