UC San Fran Champions Dangerous Anti-Palestinian Racism Study
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has threatened its institutional credibility by backing a dangerous study on anti-Palestinian racism that seems to flout the most basic tenets of academic research. This comes as the university is still under a hiring freeze as a result of federal and state budget cuts.
The study, "Systemic Anti-Palestinian Racism Against US Healthcare Providers”, released earlier this year by the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism (IUAPR), has been shared heavily among activists and media.
However, upon closer examination, the study does more harm than good in its efforts to combat racial bias and bigotry endured by Palestinian healthcare workers, as it fails to meet even the most basic standards of sound research. For starters, the study claims to be the first nationwide survey to document 'systemic' racism against healthcare providers. In fact, 68% of participants were not healthcare workers. A survey of less than 400 medical professionals is, at best, a pilot study that cannot prove anything "systemic" about healthcare institutions in the United States.
Furthermore, over 72% of participants were not Palestinian. This raises the issue of construct validity, meaning the degree to which a study's data measures what it claims to measure. According to best practices in research, the main population surveyed in a study of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) should be Palestinians themselves. In this case, they were the minority, and the IUAPR report provides no specific information about their experiences with APR.
Additionally, IUAPR claims to have studied "a general population of people in the United States." Yet over 42% of the participants were Muslim and almost 36% were Arab or Arab American, despite the fact that each of these groups makes up roughly 1% of the total U.S. population. If the authors had openly stated that their intent was to disproportionately focus on these communities, that may have been legitimate. Instead, they framed their clearly skewed results as representative of the broader American public.
IUAPR researchers used a method that researchers refer to as snowball sampling, or recruiting primarily from activist and social networks. Distributing a survey in this manner virtually guarantees that those with strong pre-existing views will dominate the responses. Researchers possess an ethical responsibility to include a clear disclaimer that the results do not represent the broader population of Americans or healthcare providers. Failure to do so misleads the public by shielding them from the fundamental limitations of their study.
IUAPR attempted to correct for this by noting participation across races, ages, religions, and LGBTQ+ groups. Diversity, however, is not the same thing as representativeness. A representative sample would mirror the actual composition of the population under study, with controls to correct for bias.
In reality, this study surveyed a small and unrepresentative group of less than 400 people in medicine, and it is likely that most of them were politically aligned with IUAPR.
Further tainting the study’s legitimacy was the involvement of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA), which academic reviewers, such as the International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, have acknowledged is a “political advocacy tool, not a legal framework to combat racism.”
The study's findings were likely further skewed by the fact that it was "designed in consultation with" the ACLA and rooted in that group's definition of “anti-Palestinian racism." According to a review in the International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, ACLA's definition "is a political advocacy tool, not a legal framework to combat racism." These same reviewers also discovered that the group’s definition would "codify a claim that Jewish identity is racist by erasing the Jewish people's more than 3,000-year-old religious, spiritual, and cultural connection with the land of Israel."
Exposing study participants to deeply biased definitions before they answer questions about their experiences is a common way to distort data or, even worse, to lie with statistics. The impact in this case would be to inflate the number of healthcare professionals who have experienced anti-Palestinian racism by encouraging them to view political disagreements or even basic expressions of Jewish identity as "racist."
UCSF cannot be held blameless. Dr. Jess Ghannam, the study’s corresponding author, is a clinical professor of psychiatry and global health sciences at the UCSF School of Medicine who ensured that it received the university’s institutional review board approval before it began. Institutional review boards are tasked with reviewing "all research that involves human subjects performed by UCSF faculty." It is possible that the deep flaws and misleading conclusions in the study were not clear ahead of time, but that does not absolve them of their duty to revoke their approval for junk science.
It is possible that UCSF was aware of these issues; however, as the report carries a disclaimer that it does “not represent the views of UCSF.” This is irrelevant in the bigger picture because universities and their institutional review boards must always bear the responsibility for research approved by them.
Any scholar with a basic understanding of research methodology can recognize that this study falls short of what should be expected from both IUAPR and UCSF. The academic community and broader public must demand accountability from these institutions or risk the societal harms that come with unreliable research.
