Get started
Work

Evaluating Racial Match and Concordance in ASD Interventions: Preliminary Findings from a Multidisciplinary Scoping Review

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Reflective EssayThe origin of my research project emerged from my experience working as a research assistant at the Koegel Autism Center, where I worked on a project comparing social skill improvements in neurodivergent teens through in-person versus telehealth formats.As part of this study, I helped teach social skills curriculum lessons and worked directly with two Latino/a clients.As an African-American, I was excited to be working with clients that share a similar cultural background, but my excitement quickly turned into peril.My clients struggled more than non-minority participants in grasping the curriculum that was taught, communicating with peers, and participating in group activities.I noticed disparities in the effectiveness of the intervention, as well as differences in the sense of "social comfortability" my clients exhibited, which sparked my curiosity about the role of racial and cultural factors in ASD therapy and intervention outcomes.Seeing these disparities firsthand, I began investigating the current literature on racial concordance, which is the concept of a patient and provider sharing the same racial background.I turned to UCSB's library resources, specifically PsycINFO, PubMed, and Google Scholar to see if racial concordance was a topic heavily researched within the ASD community.To my surprise, I found no major studies researching this concept.I also noticed that racial concordance had a plethora of empirical and clinical evidence of being effective within other fields, specifically education, healthcare, and psychology.Given this multidisciplinary observation, I conducted a scoping review to map existing literature on culturally-tailored ASD interventions, identify gaps in racial concordance as a strategy, and assess any transferable evidence across the fields of education, psychology, and healthcare.To ensure a culturally informed approach, I pursued full-text access to articles exploring racial concordance in contexts often underrepresented in ASD literature.When UCSB subscriptions didn't provide access, I submitted InterLibrary Loan (ILL) requests for studies such as Sohler et al. (2007) on trust in HIV care, Howes & Shivers (2006) on ethnic match in early childcare, Zane et al. (2005) on cognitive and cultural match in therapy, and Won et al. (2004) on autism care in Korean-American populations, ensuring vital perspectives were not excluded from analysis.From the beginning of my project, I was lost with the process of conducting a scoping review.From PRISMA guidelines, boolean operators, keywords, and optimizing my search strategy, I felt like I was in way over my head.This all changed one day, when I was ironically looking at Youtube videos on scoping reviews, I saw a post on the 1st floor library bigscreen about a workshop on literature reviews.While designed for graduate students, I immediately enrolled and gained valuable insight into how to effectively run my search.Following this workshop, I began to run my pilot search with my keywords, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and appropriate databases.This is when I ran into my second problem, I did not know how to use ERIC or PubMed.I vividly remember my first search into PubMed giving me 40,000 results!Once again, I consulted the use of library research materials.I found the research librarian, Kristen Labonte, and immediately made an appointment.During this appointment, I shared my search strategy, keywords, boolean operators, and databases I intended to use with Ms. Labonte.Not only did she teach me how to access PubMed and ERIC directly through the UCSB library databases (so I could access articles that weren't open-access), but she also gave me the keywords "cultural consonance" and "cultural sensitivity" to add to my search.Ms. Labonte also taught me how to effectively use boolean operators (ex: using intervent* or therap* instead of intervention or therapy), which was instrumental in narrowing my search scope.Now that I was fully ready to begin my search, I employed a multi-step search strategy to discover relevant studies.Because my scoping review was multidisciplinary, I had to search through multiple disciplines using multiple search strings.With the help of Ms. Labonte, I developed my search string to a 4-fledged approach: an ASD search, Education search, Healthcare search, and Psychology search.For example, my ASD search in PubMed was (Autism OR ASD OR "Autism Spectrum Disorder") AND ("racial match" OR racial concordance") while my education search would be (Education) AND ("racial match" OR "racial concordance").Conducting the search in this manner generated specific and relevant results from each discipline, leading to screening 1,474 articles from the databases of ERIC, PubMed, and PsycINFO.The UCSB library research pages also gave me valuable insight into all the different databases that were available to search, which in collaboration with my advisor I narrowed down to these three.This research journey did not come without its fair share of challenges.When I began my pilot search, I found that many ASD studies did not look at racial concordance at all, with culturally-adaptive interventions also being hard to find.I navigated this by using citation tracking and reference mining to find all key studies on culturally-tailored interventions, which was also recommended by Ms. Labonte.Additionally, I reached out to Amber Davis, who has conducted culturally-responsive ASD research at John Hopkins.She reaffirmed my search strategy and gave me the confidence that this research was truly impactful.Beyond shaping my research methodology, UCSB's library resources also gave me the confidence to disseminate my findings on a larger scale.While working on this project, I frequently walked past the URCA poster presentations displayed on the first floor of the library.Seeing my peers' work showcased in a professional setting inspired me to submit my research as an abstract to the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) conference.What seemed like an ambitious goal now felt attainable, reinforcing the idea that research should not remain in isolation but be shared with broader academic and clinical communities.This process was truly invaluable in my academic and personal journey, and the resources and support offered through UCSB's library were foundational to advancing my skills for whatever route I take upon graduation.
Author: Ekpo, Joseph
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7009752084
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: