Can Racial Literacy for HSR Reduce the “Tsunami of Hate?”
Racist and inflammatory language as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic should be a major cause of concern for the field of health services research (HSR).
Ninez A. Ponce, Ph.D. (B.S. UC Berkeley; M.P.P. Harvard; Ph.D. UCLA), is Professor and Endowed Chair in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, and Principal Investigator for the California Health Interview Survey, the largest state survey in the USA. Her research contributes to the elimination of racial/ethnic/social disparities in health. Dr. Ponce is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors, National Center for Health Statistics. She has participated in committees for the National Academy of Sciences and the National Quality Forum, where her expertise has focused on setting guidance for health systems in the measurement and use of social determinants of health as tools to monitor health equity. She has received numerous awards from community organizations recognizing her work in community-engaged research. In 2019 Dr. Ponce and her team received the AcademyHealth Impact award for their contributions to population health measurement to inform public policies. Dr. Ponce serves on the Board of Directors at AcademyHealth from 2021-2023. Her portfolio includes a mixture of scholarly work and real-time knowledge diffusion studies, with over 140 peer-reviewed publications, over 60 policy reports, and various creative data access tools to democratize health data. Dr. Ponce champions better data, especially for people from marginalized racial and ethnic, sexual orientation and gender identity, and immigrant populations. She firmly believes that equity-centered data will lead to more meaningful program and policy inferences and better care for overlooked groups.
- 2019 HSR Impact Award
Authored by Ninez A. Ponce, Ph.D., M.P.P.
Misclassification and Undercounts of "Race" and Ethnicity
In this session from “Understanding and Eliminating Bias in HSR Methods: Approaches to Anti-racist Research Design, Analysis, and Dissemination,” presenters describe approaches to improving data collection and analysis with Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American people, and other under-represented groups.