Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/86856
Title: Measuring the bias against low-income country research: an Implicit Association Test
Authors: Harris, Matthew
Macinko, James
Jimenez, Geronimo
Mullachery, Pricila
Keywords: Implicit Association Test
Bias
Issue Date: 2017
Source: Harris, M., Macinko, J., Jimenez, G., & Mullachery, P. (2017). Measuring the bias against low-income country research: an Implicit Association Test. Globalization and Health, 13(1), 80-.
Series/Report no.: Globalization and Health
Abstract: Background: With an increasing array of innovations and research emerging from low-income countries there is a growing recognition that even high-income countries could learn from these contexts. It is well known that the source of a product influences perception of that product, but little research has examined whether this applies also in evidence-based medicine and decision-making. In order to examine likely barriers to learning from low-income countries, this study uses established methods in cognitive psychology to explore whether healthcare professionals and researchers implicitly associate good research with rich countries more so than with poor countries. Methods: Computer-based Implicit Association Test (IAT) distributed to healthcare professionals and researchers. Stimuli representing Rich Countries were chosen from OECD members in the top ten (>$36,000 per capita) World Bank rankings and Poor Countries were chosen from the bottom thirty (<$1000 per capita) countries by GDP per capita, in both cases giving attention to regional representation. Stimuli representing Research were descriptors of the motivation (objective/biased), value (useful/worthless), clarity (precise/vague), process (transparent/dishonest), and trustworthiness (credible/unreliable) of research. IAT results are presented as a Cohen’s d statistic. Quantile regression was used to assess the contribution of covariates (e.g. age, sex, country of origin) to different values of IAT responses that correspond to different levels of implicit bias. Poisson regression was used to model dichotomized responses to the explicit bias item. Results: Three hundred twenty one tests were completed in a four-week period between March and April 2015. The mean Implicit Association Test result (a standardized mean relative latency between congruent and non-congruent categories) for the sample was 0.57 (95% CI 0.52 to 0.61) indicating that on average our sample exhibited moderately strong implicit associations between Rich Countries and Good Research. People over 40 years of age were less likely to exhibit pro-poor implicit associations, and being a peer reviewer contributes to a more pro-poor association. Conclusions: The majority of our participants associate Good Research with Rich Countries, compared to Poor Countries. Implicit associations such as these might disfavor research from poor countries in research evaluation, evidence-based medicine and diffusion of innovations.
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/86856
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/44268
DOI: 10.1186/s12992-017-0304-y
Schools: Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine) 
Organisations: Centre for Population Health Sciences
Rights: © 2017 The Author(s) (BioMed Central). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Fulltext Permission: open
Fulltext Availability: With Fulltext
Appears in Collections:LKCMedicine Journal Articles

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