Research & Studies

A new study led by researchers at the Vanderbilt Sports Concussion Center and the University of Alabama found that for athletes competing in middle school, high school, and college sports, Black athletes reported a shorter time between injury and symptom resolution and spent fewer days out of school than their White peers.

The current research found that using minimum lottery thresholds for GPA and standardized tests, both together and separately, the participation of students of color and low-income students dropped precipitously, in some models to levels below 2 percent of the entering class.

Researchers found that on some issues, partisan gaps among teens were larger — though not much larger — than those among adults. This larger gap is mainly driven by teenagers from Republican families having on average more right-leaning perceptions than their parents.

The Brookings Institution study finds that there are stark contrasts in access to credit for African Americans: Interest rates on business loans, bank branch density, local banking concentration in the residential mortgage market, and the growth of local businesses are markedly different in majority Black neighborhoods.

New research from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center finds that Black enrollments in higher education are down 5.1 percent from a year ago and by more than 11 percent over the past two years. The steepest declines are at the community college level.

Nationwide, 66 percent of college students cast ballots in 2020, up from 52 percent in 2016. The survey found that 63 percent of all African American college students voted in 2020. In 2016, 53 percent of all Black college students voted.

From April 1, 2020 through June 30, 2021, data suggest that more than 140,000 children under age 18 in the United States lost a parent, custodial grandparent, or grandparent caregiver who provided the child’s home and basic needs. Black children were 2.4 times as likely as White children to lose a caregiver.

"The poverty rate, household income, homeownership, employment — not only is there no progress, there’s no change. We’re saying that in a lot of ways the situation is more entrenched, more solidified.”

A new study by Dan P. Ly, an assistant professor at the Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, finds that physicians prescribed opioids more often to their White patients who complained of new-onset low back pain than to their Black patients.

In a year when many test dates were postponed or canceled due to the global pandemic and when many colleges and universities made standardized test scores optional, the persistent racial gap in scores on the ACT college entrance examination grew wider. Whites were more than five times as likely as Blacks to be prepared for college-level work in all four areas of English, math, science, and reading.

In the fall of 2020, 53,754 African Americans enrolled in graduate school for the first time. African Americans made up 12.3 percent of all first-time graduate enrollees from the United States in 2020. Of these, 69.4 percent were women.

Beginning in the 1930s and 40s, the federal government delineated areas where mortgages could be insured. These redlining policies, which remained in effect until the 1960s, led to decades of community disinvestment, concentrated poverty in inner-city neighborhoods, and denied residents the ability to build intergenerational wealth through homeownership. Health impacts remain to this day.

A new report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies finds that in the Black rural South, 25.8 percent of residents lack the option to subscribe to high-speed broadband compared to 8.8 percent of non-southern rural residents and 3.8 percent of all Americans. Even where broadband is available in the Black rural South, many find it unaffordable.

A new study by researchers at Yale University, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and Vanderbilt University finds that patients who identify as racial and ethnic minorities prefer medical providers who share and understand their culture, but those patients are not as likely as others to access providers who can provide such care.

Researchers examined investment account ownership across more than 80,000 households of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds over a six-year period. They found only about a quarter of African American adults owned a taxable investment account, and more than half owned no investments of any kind.

Of the more than 4.6 million students enrolled in private schools in the United States in 2019, 9.4 percent were Black or African American. Blacks made up a greater percentage of students in smaller private schools and in private schools in urban areas.

A new paper by researchers at Yale University finds racial disparities in the use of physical restraints on children who are admitted to the hospital emergency department. Black children are significantly more likely than White children to be subdued with restraints during visits to emergency rooms.

A new study by researchers at the University of Houston found a significant disparity in the quality and safety of food available in low- versus high-income communities. The results may explain - at least in part -  the high levels of gastrointestinal illness in predominantly Black urban neighborhoods.

In 2020, 17.4 percent of all Black families were living in poverty. The government defines the poverty rate for a four-person family - two adults and two children - as having an annual income of less than $26,646. For non-Hispanic White families, only 5.7 percent were living below the poverty threshold.

In one California school district, ninth graders with a grade-point average of 2.0 or under were automatically enrolled in an ethnic study course. The research showed that enrollment in ethnic studies substantially increased high school graduation, attendance, and the probability of enrolling in college.