Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Research Teams: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

• Author: L. Cait Kanewske,Katherine Kafonek,Angela J. Hattery,Shannon Magnuson,Allison Monterrosa,Cameron Shaw,Earl Smith,Rochelle Davidson Mhonde
• Date: 01 July 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/21533687221087373
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

in Research Teams: The Good,

The Bad, and The Ugly

Angela J. Hattery Ph.D

1

, Earl Smith

1

,

Shannon Magnuson

2

, Allison Monterrosa

3

,

Katherine Kafonek

4

, Cameron Shaw

5

,

Rochelle Davidson Mhonde

6

,

and L. Cait Kanewske

7

Abstract

Since the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the racial justice protests

that followed, many institutions, including the academy, pledged their support for pol-

icies and practices that combat on-going racial injustice. Social justice and anti-racism

initiatives abound on college campuses, including programming, hosting speakers, and

proposing required ‘diversity’classes for all students. For all this rhetoric, college

and university administrators have remained silent when it comes to diversity, equity,

and inclusion practices as they relate to research. And yet, extant research docu-

ments the ways in which racial and gender biases have consistently shaped every

level of research from the development of the research question, to the diversity

(or not) of the sample, the availability of funding, and the probability of publishing.

In this paper we focus on one aspect of the research process: the assembling (or

not) of diverse research teams. We explore the benef‌its that diversity in research

teams brings to the integrity of the data as well as the obstacles to both assembling

1

Department of Women and Gender Studies, University of Delaware College of Arts and Sciences,

Newark, Delaware, USA

2

Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

3

Department of Ethnic Studies, California State University San Marcos, San Marcos, California, USA

4

Department of Criminology, California State University Fresno, Fresno, California, USA

5

Department of Higher Education, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

6

Department of Communication, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

7

Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

Corresponding Author:

Angela Hattery, co-Director, Center for the Study & Prevention of Gender Based Violence and Professor,

Women & Gender Studies, University of Delaware, USA.

Email: hatterya@gmail.com

Article

Race and Justice

2022, Vol. 12(3) 505-530

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/21533687221087373

journals.sagepub.com/home/raj

a diverse research team and managing it successfully. Specif‌ically, this paper focuses on

the myriad ways in which diversity in research teams is treated as a set of boxes to

check, rather than an epistemology that underscores positionality and power. We

present a series of case examples that highlight the ways in which diversity, equity,

and inclusion are successfully and unsuccessfully achieved in research teams, both

in terms of outcomes and experiences. These case examples focus specif‌ically on

power relations along all forms of diversity, including race and gender as well as

rank. The case examples also serve to unpack the ways in which research teams

can rely on positionality as a tool for addressing power at three distinct levels: in con-

ducting social science research generally, between the researcher and the

“researched,”and among the research team itself.

Keywords

Diversity, equity and inclusion, epistemology, research methods

Introduction

White, cisgender, heterosexual men dominate at the ranks of full professor within

Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). White women, though they are still rare

among the ranks of full professor, are well represented among the ranks of assistant

and associate professor. Comparatively, those with other marginalized identities, espe-

cially non-whites, are often relegated to the ranks of instructor and adjunct across PWIs

(Zambrana et al., 2017). The lack of diversity among faculty and thus lead researchers,

and the ways in which this lack of diversity limits the depth and quality of research

evidence the institution produces, continues to be a key concern. However, following

the murder of George Floyd and the social justice protests that followed, many insti-

tutions, including PWIs, revisited how their own policies and practices contribute to

ongoing social injustice on their own campuses (Clayton, 2021). In their own internal

reviews, many PWIs and universities have clamored to champion ‘diversity, equity,

and inclusion’(DEI) (Huff, 2021). Although institutions at times treated these distinct

and discrete concepts as a singular entity, they nonetheless began to develop sustain-

able pipelines for recruiting cisgender women and individuals historically excluded

from PWIs, like Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and members of

the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and others (LGBTQ+) community.

These strategies sought to bring fresh perspectives to the classroom, new ways of

approaching research design and questions, and more robust lenses from which to

analyze, conceptualize, and write about data. Despite these efforts, students, faculty,

and academic on-lookers continue to discuss the underwhelming substantive impact

of DEI commitments. As a result, academia, and by default research teams operating

within PWIs, remain dominated by white, cisgender, heterosexual men and women.

Many scholars talk about the importance of diversity in research teams (Cheruvelil

et al., 2014), citing the ‘edge effect’and its implications on the quality and depth of

research rigor and production. The edge effect was f‌irst def‌ined by Odum (1953) as

506 Race and Justice 12(3)