Researching Black Communities

Book excerpt: Experts from a range of disciplines offer practical advice for conducting social science research in racial and ethnic minority populations. Readers will learn how to choose appropriate methods—longitudinal studies, national surveys, quantitative analysis, personal interviews, and other qualitative approaches—and how best to employ them for research on specific demographic groups. The volume opens with a brief introduction to the difficulty of defining a population and designing a research program and then moves to illustrative examples drawn from the contributors’ own studies of Blacks in the United States, the Caribbean, and South Africa. Case studies cover research on the media, mental health, churches, work, marital relationships, education, and family roles.