Institute of Public Health and Nursing Research, Department of Social Epidemiology, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
Health Sciences Bremen, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
BMC Med Res Methodol. 2024 Aug 10;24(1):180. doi: 10.1186/s12874-024-02258-7.
There is a growing awareness of the need to adequately integrate sex and gender into health-related research. Although it is widely known that the entangled dimensions sex/gender are not comprehensively considered in most studies to date, current publications of conceptual considerations and guidelines often only give recommendations for certain stages of the research process and - to the best of our knowledge - there is a lack of a detailed guidance that accompanies each step of the entire research process. The interdisciplinary project "Integrating gender into environmental health research" (INGER) aimed to fill this gap by developing a comprehensive checklist that encourages sex/gender transformative research at all stages of the research process of quantitative health research. In the long term this contributes to a more sex/gender-equitable research.
The checklist builds on current guidelines on sex/gender in health-related research. Starting from important key documents, publications from disciplines involved in INGER were collected. Furthermore, we used a snowball method to include further relevant titles. The identification of relevant publications was continued until saturation was reached. 55 relevant publications published between 2000 and 2021 were identified, assessed, summarised and included in the developed checklist. After noticing that most publications did not cover every step of the research process and often considered sex/gender in a binary way, the recommendations were modified and enriched based on the authors' expertise to cover every research step and to add further categories to the binary sex/gender categories.
The checklist comprises 67 items in 15 sections for integrating sex/gender in quantitative health-related research and addresses aspects of the whole research process of planning, implementing and analysing quantitative health studies as well as aspects of appropriate language, communication of results to the scientific community and the public, and research team composition.
The developed comprehensive checklist goes beyond a binary consideration of sex/gender and thus enables sex/gender-transformative research. Although the project INGER focused on environmental health research, no aspects that were specific to this research area were identified in the checklist. The resulting comprehensive checklist can therefore be used in different quantitative health-related research fields.
人们越来越意识到需要充分将性别纳入与健康相关的研究中。尽管目前人们普遍认识到，迄今为止，大多数研究都没有全面考虑到性别这一复杂问题，但当前关于概念性考虑和指南的出版物通常仅为研究过程的某些阶段提供建议——据我们所知——缺乏一份详细的指南，该指南可以伴随整个研究过程的每一步。跨学科项目“将性别纳入环境健康研究”（INGER）旨在通过开发一份全面的清单来填补这一空白，该清单鼓励在定量健康研究过程的所有阶段进行性别转换研究。从长远来看，这有助于实现更公平的性别研究。
该清单基于与健康相关的研究中性别问题的现行准则。从重要的关键文件入手，收集了 INGER 所涉及学科的出版物。此外，我们还使用滚雪球的方法纳入了更多相关标题。直到达到饱和状态，才确定相关出版物的数量。共确定了 55 篇发表于 2000 年至 2021 年之间的相关出版物，对这些出版物进行了评估、总结，并纳入到开发的清单中。注意到大多数出版物并未涵盖研究过程的每一步，且经常以二元的方式考虑性别问题后，根据作者的专业知识对建议进行了修改和扩充，以涵盖每一个研究步骤，并为二元性别类别添加了更多类别。
该清单包含了 67 个项目，分为 15 个部分，用于将性别纳入定量健康相关研究中，涉及规划、实施和分析定量健康研究的整个研究过程，以及适当语言、向科学界和公众传播研究结果以及研究团队组成等方面。
开发的全面清单超越了二元性别考虑，从而实现了性别转换研究。尽管 INGER 项目侧重于环境健康研究，但清单中并未确定与该研究领域相关的具体内容。因此，由此产生的全面清单可用于不同的定量健康相关研究领域。
