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. 2013 Oct;201(10):860-71.
doi: 10.1097/NMD.0b013e3182a5c184.

GAP-REACH: a checklist to assess comprehensive reporting of race, ethnicity, and culture in psychiatric publications

Roberto Lewis-Fernández  1 , Greer A Raggio, Magdaliz Gorritz, Naihua Duan, Sue Marcus, Leopoldo J Cabassa, Jennifer Humensky, Anne E Becker, Renato D Alarcón, María A Oquendo, Helena Hansen, Robert C Like, Mitchell Weiss, Prakash N Desai, Frederick M Jacobsen, Edward F Foulks, Annelle Primm, Francis Lu, Alex Kopelowicz, Ladson Hinton, Devon E Hinton
Affiliations

GAP-REACH: a checklist to assess comprehensive reporting of race, ethnicity, and culture in psychiatric publications

Roberto Lewis-Fernández et al. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2013 Oct.

Abstract

Growing awareness of health and health care disparities highlights the importance of including information about race, ethnicity, and culture (REC) in health research. Reporting of REC factors in research publications, however, is notoriously imprecise and unsystematic. This article describes the development of a checklist to assess the comprehensiveness and the applicability of REC factor reporting in psychiatric research publications. The 16-item GAP-REACH checklist was developed through a rigorous process of expert consensus, empirical content analysis in a sample of publications (N = 1205), and interrater reliability (IRR) assessment (N = 30). The items assess each section in the conventional structure of a health research article. Data from the assessment may be considered on an item-by-item basis or as a total score ranging from 0% to 100%. The final checklist has excellent IRR (κ = 0.91). The GAP-REACH may be used by multiple research stakeholders to assess the scope of REC reporting in a research article.

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Conflict of interest statement

DISCLOSURES

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Stages and steps in the development of the GAP-REACH checklist.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Distribution of GAP-REACH scores in the pretesting sample (n = 30), by coder.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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