Cultural Sensitivity in Research

Culturally sensitive research involves integrating cultural beliefs, characteristics, attitudes, values, traditions, experiences, and norms of a target population into research design, implementation, evaluation, and materials. Increasing globalization and growing multiculturally diverse populations have highlighted the need for research to move beyond focusing predominantly on European-American, White, middle-class participants, as research findings may not generalize to nonmajority cultures. However, scholars must consider how participant culture may influence participants’ interaction with and response to research. Conducting culturally sensitive research is important both from an ethical standpoint and for research design and result validity. Research that ignores or does not account for the cultural perspective of participants is invalid; in other words, the findings may not accurately represent participant perspectives and thus the quality of research or the ...