OPRE studies the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) programs and the populations they serve through rigorous research and evaluation efforts guided by the principles of rigor, relevance, transparency, independence, and ethics. While these principles remain a constant, our understanding of how to best achieve them requires continuous innovation and improvement. As part of our ongoing efforts to bring new understandings to bear on implementing these principles, OPRE has been working, since 2016, to incorporate racially equitable approaches into our work. Since 2016, we’ve been exploring what it means to make OPRE’s research and evaluation work more racially equitable and how to take concrete steps to do so. Informed by an initial set of consultations with external experts, who helped us build foundational understandings of how issues of race, ethnicity, histories of discrimination, structural inequities, and exclusion affect the work we do, OPRE staff developed an internal action plan for making racial equity actionable and central to our research and evaluation work. Three key steps from that plan have been shared on OPRE’s Race Equity Research and Resources page and on ACF’s Equity in Action webpage.
One of those key action steps was to publish a statement articulating OPRE’s commitment to racial equity and sharing OPRE’s definition of racial equity in relation to research and evaluation efforts. We are pleased to announce that we have published this statement. You can find it here.
This statement is an important milestone for OPRE’s equity work in several ways:
- It is a tangible expression of OPRE’s commitment to incorporating racially equitable approaches into our research and evaluation work.
- It explains why a focus on racial equity is so important to our work and what this means both conceptually and in practice for our research and evaluation efforts.
- It lays out our vision for what we intend to accomplish; a guiding vision to continue to come back to, to inform our ongoing work and growing efforts in this space.
- It serves as a mechanism for accountability; it allows those who follow and are impacted by our work to assess our continued actions and investments against the intentions we articulate in this statement.
For OPRE, racial equity requires recognizing the ways historical and ongoing racism (both structural and interpersonal) has affected the populations served by the ACF and the programs we oversee. What does this mean in practice? As the statement articulates, among other things, it means rethinking our approaches to each stage of the research process (such as our development of research questions, collection and interpretation of data, and our dissemination of findings) to better account for the impacts of racism. It means recognizing that we need to bring that same scrutiny to the research methodologies and research literature we rely on, as they, too, have been influenced by racism and the broader sociocultural contexts in which they were developed, and that this affects how well these methods and literature can capture and explain different racial and ethnic groups’ experiences. It also means involving, throughout the research process, members of groups most impacted by the programs or issues being studied and doing so in ways that acknowledge past harms, focus on the strengths and resiliencies of the communities we aim to serve, build trust, recognize and elevate group members’ expertise, and ensure accountability.
With this statement, we make clear that a focus on racial equity is not an add-on that’s nice to have, it’s essential to OPRE’s work. It is essential to our ability to build evidence to improve the lives of children, families, and individuals and necessary for us to accomplish our goal of conducting rigorous research and evaluations. Racially equitable approaches bolster our ability to ask the right questions, use the most effective research designs and methods, deploy the most appropriate measures, interpret findings more accurately, and share findings in ways that better meet different communities’ needs. Improving the quality of the evidence we build and disseminate allows OPRE to inform ACF’s policies and practices more usefully and better support improving the operations of ACF programs and outcomes for the populations we serve.