Is reporting race and ethnicity essential to occupational therapy evidence?

Charles Ellis, Jr., PhD, CCC-SLP, is Associate Professor, Department of Health Sciences and Research, College of Health Professions, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston. In 2017, the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) will reach its centennial. As the profession moves toward this momentous milestone, a new vision for occupational therapy has emerged. AOTA’s Centennial Vision of occupational therapy as being “a powerful, widely recognized, science-driven, and evidence-based profession with a globally connected and diverse workforce meeting society’s occupational needs” offers many opportunities and challenges (AOTA, 2007, p. 613). One key component of the Centennial Vision is AOTA’s emphasis on the implementation of evidence-based practice (EBP) among its practitioners. According to Lin, Murphy, and Robinson (2010), EBP is a priority for occupational therapy and other health professions because clinicians are now more accountable for the services they provide and are under great pressure to justify their services to third-party payers. To aid clinicians, AOTA has created resources such as OT Search, the Evidence Brief Series, the Occupational Therapy Practice Guidelines Series, and the EBP Resource Directory to ensure that clinicians have access to the most up-to-date and clinically relevant evidence (Lin et al., 2010). To promote the development of comprehensive resources to support EBP, occupational therapy professionals must take care to ensure that the research evidence that is emerging and being transferred to practicing clinicians is of the highest quality. Systematic appraisals of the available evidence should describe how well the findings support practitioners in their clinical settings and are applicable to the patient populations they serve. EBP requires the use of treatment approaches that are the best available not only on the basis of the clinician’s expertise but also in keeping with the client’s preferences and evidence of the treatment’s effectiveness for members of the client’s specific background (Hill-Briggs, Kelly, & Ewing, 2010). Because AOTA emphasizes EBP, researchers and clinicians alike must consider the great diversity (e.g., in race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status [SES], class) that exists in society and the need to recognize this diversity during the delivery of services. Participant race and ethnicity, however, are two key variables frequently missing in occupational therapy research studies. Race has been operationalized as “the category to which others assign individuals on the basis of physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair type, and the generalizations and stereotypes made as a result” and ethnicity as “the group mores and practices of one’s culture of origin” (American Psychological Association [APA], 2003, p. 380). The fact that studies published in occupational therapy journals do not consistently report the race and ethnicity of the participants (e.g., Cena, McGruder, & Tomlin, 2002) leads one to question whether reporting race and