Over the last century, social policies and programs and national support systems intended to help families and children improve their well-being were not necessarily designed to reduce burden or narrow gaps in access and outcomes for communities of color whereas white communities benefit from these supports. This brief presents lessons learned from projects that aimed to analyze three different national policies related to families in the US—the treatment of marriage in the tax system, child foster care placement, and the uptake of Social Security benefits—and the role of structural racism in the design and implementation of these policies. Urban Institute’s Office of Race and Equity Research asked three experts and scholars in their respective fields, Dorothy Brown (tax law and policy), Darcey H. Merritt (child welfare policy), and Mikki D. Waid (retirement policy and Social Security), about the kinds of analytical and research challenges researchers should address when studying each of these policies with a structural racism lens.
Why this matters
While researchers and the broader learning community are increasingly moving toward analyzing and understanding the deep legacy of racism in social programs, many are facing knowledge, experiential, analytical and methodological challenges. Because structural racism permeates across systems, spans across generations and is woven into various national-level laws and programs, it raises measurement and causal identification challenges that researchers need to name related to estimating or discussing its effects. This brief summarizes feedback on a common set of dimensions that encourage researchers to move away from narratives and decisions based on individual characteristics and toward identification and understanding of system-level decisions.
Key takeaways
Common Considerations Across Analyses
- Identify System-Level Design Choices and Drivers: Structural racism, a system-level phenomenon, currently is not fully measured in large datasets that tend to collect individual-level characteristics or responses. The mechanisms of racism cannot be well-measured in survey instruments, in part, because it is about systems and not just individual experiences, and it is difficult for people to respond about how a combination of multiple forces operates on their lives.
- Include Contextual Analysis: Researchers also need to consider how structural racism may shape the context of an intervention or policy and how that context interacts with other policy levers and may cause and sustain inequities. Tabulating data on racial disparities is not sufficient to show the effects of structural racism unless it is accompanied with current and previous context explaining how and why these disparities exist.
- Design and Conduct Interviews for Trust and Nuance: It is critical for researchers to build trust and rapport with participants; it helps generate rich conversations, maintain respect, and minimize the often-transactional nature of researchers asking participants for information. This is especially true when researchers are inquiring about sensitive topics such as how people perceive and experience race and racism and when participants do not identify with the social identity or backgrounds of the research team.
Lessons Experts Identified Across Three Projects
- Studying racial disparities is not the same as studying racism, and studies aiming to assess the causal effect of structural racism are not the same as studies of the moderating effect of race or other demographic characteristics. Study designs should articulate and reflect this distinction of causal vs correlational and structural vs individual analysis.
- The framing of a study of structural racism requires citing previous work that uses a structural racism lens, clearly indicating whether racism is being treated as a contextual or causal factor.
- Project teams should include scholars and practitioners of color with expertise on and lived experience of structural racism. Because researchers are often trained within a narrow discipline, method and a specific program or field specialization, they may lack the subject matter expertise on structural racism, may not be fully versed in the literature on structural racism and/or have the lived experience to frame research questions from this perspective. Researchers’ positionality, which includes their world view, beliefs, values and lived experience, shape the way research is conducted, its outcomes and results, and who has power to conduct and disseminate research.
How we did it
To explore how structural racism drives outcomes across policy areas, in late 2021, Urban Institute experts launched the project “Interrupting Structural Racism’s Impact on Health and Well-Being,” which included five demonstration studies of varied scope and approach to examine how structural racism plays out in different systems and how systemic changes could produce more equitable outcomes. The studies spanned the fields of transportation, behavioral health, child welfare, tax policy, and retirement policy.
To support the participating researchers, we assembled a primarily Black, and people of color (BIPOC) leadership and advisory team that brought extensive experience studying racial inequality in policy and practice across issue areas. This advisory group included founders and leads of Urban’s Office of Race and Equity Research (ORER), which launched in 2022, several experts who came to Urban through the equity scholars program and external experts with relevant subject matter expertise, including Dorothy Brown, Darcey H. Merritt, and Mikki D. Waid. The external experts’ feedback provided a common set of dimensions to consider, focusing on improving the framing and analysis of the historical and current structures that led to and maintain the ongoing disparities in national policies in the United States, which were synthesized in this brief.