EDII and Behavioural Research: Inclusive and Rigorous Science

Understanding what motivates behaviour and enables behaviour change requires understanding how people are positioned in their everyday lives. This point became abundantly clear during the Covid-19 pandemic. Being told to “just stay home” when your job is to care for others, or not to mix with people when your home is shared with many people in a small space was impracticable. Equally, being offered a lifesaving vaccine when you cannot afford to miss work or pay for the bus fare to the vaccine centre were daily realities for many during Covid-19. The point here is that taking diversity seriously and being inclusive in behavioural research is not just morally desirable, but enhances the quality, relevance, and impact of research outcomes and whether or not research recommendations are relevant to the general population and enable effective strategies to be implemented. 

This is why Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, and Intersectionality (EDII) are not just buzzwords but essential to excellent behavioural research. Understanding what drives behaviour and how to support meaningful change means understanding the complexity of people’s everyday lives. To achieve this, everyone must have equal opportunities to participate in research. Research teams and study samples should mirror the diversity of the communities and societies in which the work takes place. This means making efforts to include people from a wide range of backgrounds, so their perspectives and experiences are genuinely represented. Equally important, behavioural research has to reflect the fact that people who fit into the social categories a research project is concerned with are not all the same because they also fit into other different social categories that may be highly relevant to the behaviours being investigated but ignored.

Defining terms

The first element of EDII, equality, is often described as ensuring everyone has the same opportunities. But in practice, achieving true equality requires more than simply sending out open invitations. It means actively creating research environments where people from all backgrounds feel able and welcome to participate. For that reason, the conversation has shifted toward equity as well as equality. Equity recognizes that social and economic circumstances -  like those highlighted in the Covid vaccine example above - affect whether people can actually access and benefit from opportunities. In other words, it’s not enough to offer the same chance to everyone; it is  also important to address the barriers that prevent some people from taking part in the first place.

Diversity means including people from many different social backgrounds in both research teams and study samples. By bringing together a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and skills, diversity ensures that research captures a more complete and more accurate picture of the issues being studied. This improves the creativity of research outcomes by bringing together a larger pool of experiences, ideas and approaches. Research teams are exposed to novel information and viewpoints, encouraging them to search for new solutions and question assumptions they might otherwise take for granted. Research consistently shows that diverse groups outperform homogeneous ones on creative tasks and that even the expectation of encountering different perspectives can motivate team members to prepare more thoroughly and engage more deeply, leading to higher-quality research and breakthrough discoveries. 

Inclusion helps to transform diversity from a concern with numbers into something meaningful. It’s about creating research environments where everyone feels genuinely welcomed and valued, allowing a wide range of voices to shape the questions, data, and findings. The importance of inclusion in research is powerfully illustrated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Inclusive Data Taskforce, which was established to ensure that UK statistics reflect the experiences of all people, from the initial research design through to the analysis and presentation of results. Their guiding principle was to ensure that “everyone counts, and is counted, and no one is left behind”.

One of the Taskforce’s major findings was that trust is a significant barrier to participation in data collection, especially among underrepresented groups such as Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, minority ethnic groups, and both documented and undocumented migrants. Many participants expressed a general distrust of government and official statistics, fearing their data might not be taken seriously or could be misused. This lack of trust leads to some groups being underrepresented or even invisible in official data, which in turn means that policies may fail to address their needs and can further erode trust.

True inclusion means involving diverse groups throughout the entire research process, including decisions about data access and use. When people see that their contributions are valued and acted upon, they are more likely to participate. This is crucial for reversing the decline in survey response rates and for ensuring that research findings and policies genuinely reflect the whole population

Intersectionality recognizes that everyone is simultaneously positioned in multiple social groups, including to do with racialisation, gender, sexuality, disability and religion. Applying an intersectional lens means moving beyond viewing these identities as separate or additive and instead recognizing how they combine in different ways depending on the context. An example of why this is important can be illustrated by thinking about enabling people to act on symptoms of a heart attack. It makes sense to alert people of certain ages and with particular health conditions to be alert to symptoms of heart attack, but since the intersection of these social characteristics with gender has frequently been ignored, women may not recognise that heart attacks can give different symptoms in women than in men so that they may fail to act on initial symptoms and thus suffer more deleterious consequences. An intersectional approach enables behavioural researchers to be alert to, and  address, the complexity of everyday life and record inequities that would otherwise be hidden. It can, therefore, contribute to producing more nuanced, inclusive, and socially relevant behavioural research. 

Overall, then, EDII is essential for behavioural research that is ethical, rigorous, and impactful. By embedding EDII at every level-from team composition to research design and dissemination researchers can produce findings that are more relevant, equitable, and transformative for society as a whole.

 Read the Inclusive data taskforce Recommendations report: Leaving no one behind. How can we be more inclusive in our data?