Literature Review of The Prevalence of African-American Women in Psychosexual Research Data

This literature review is an examination of the prevalence of African-American/Black women as study participants in the psychosexual research field. Historically, African-American people in the United States have been underrepresented in the research and abused as test subjects in scientific and medical research. If new theories, treatment protocols, and “best practices” are derived from research then applied across cultures, then it becomes crucial for marginalized and abused populations to be represented in the research, specifically taking into consideration systemic and medical racism, historical and current oppression, and any socioeconomic disparities. Some of the research questions this literature review aims to address include: are black women included in psychosexual research proportionally to their existence in the population and what methods are researchers using to attract black women as research participants? The methodology for this literature review was a randomized search and review of up to 100 research papers published in peer-reviewed, scholarly, psychosexual journals including: Journal of Psychosexual Health, The Journal of Sex Research, Journal of Counseling Sexology & Sexual Wellness, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, and The Journal of Sexual Medicine. This author examined research papers from 2010-2020 that included women-identifying subjects in the United States and provided demographics such as race, age, marital status, and socioeconomic data on research subjects. The number of study participants and their demographics was compared to census data during the same time frame. Findings from all the research reviews are summarized and presented in this article. Finally, this article will raise for consideration the implications of non-culturally informed research data in the field of psychosexual health and the potential ways to address any disparities in research collection.