Improving Assessment Of Race, Ethnicity, And Culture To Further Veteran Ptsd Research

Objective: Racial and ethnic disparities in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its treatment have been documented for both civilians and military veterans. To better understand the presence of disparities and factors that might contribute to them, accurate assessment of race and ethnicity is critical; however there still remains unstandardized assessment and challenges to implementation. The authors highlight specific problems in the assessment of race and ethnicity in research, such as missing data, misclassification, classification categories too limited to reflect many people s social identities, and inappropriate aggregation of ethnoracial subgroups. Conclusions: A proposal is made for a minimal uniform assessment standard of race and ethnicity. Additional recommendations incorporate principles proposed by the Institute of Medicine that allow for more granular assessment of race and ethnicity to better capture individual identity and cultural factors as they relate to the assessment, experience and management of PTSD. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.