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. 2022 Mar;82 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):73-78.
doi: 10.1111/jphd.12503.

From describing disparities to understanding why disparities exist: Anti-racist methods to support dental public health research

Eleanor Fleming  1 , Sarah E Raskin  2 , Erica Brody  3
Affiliations

From describing disparities to understanding why disparities exist: Anti-racist methods to support dental public health research

Eleanor Fleming et al. J Public Health Dent. 2022 Mar.

Abstract

Racism is understudied in the oral health literature at the same time that race is overutilized as an explanatory factor in study design. Social and behavioral methodologies offer conceptual models that can be used to include racism in dental public health questions. In addition, interdisciplinary and mixed methods approaches allow for understanding racism as an underlying cause of social and health disparities and exploring solutions that address historical, institutional, social, political, and economic drivers of oral health inequity, while recognizing the limits of measuring racism quantitatively. In a collective acknowledgement of the limitations of conventional methods, there are new opportunities to explore how qualitative and mixed methods research can serve as drivers for both social justice and health equity, while building and sustaining a diverse research workforce that can better close these disparities and offer antiracist solutions to oral health inequities.

Keywords: equity; justice; methods; public health dentistry; racism; research methods.

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Conflict of interest statement

Sarah Raskin and Eleanor Fleming are consultants with the CareQuest Institute for Oral Health.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Three phases of literature search process
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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