Racial and ethnic minorities, and the poor, have been historically neglected as subjects of study. As a result, our understanding of and theories about mental and physical health and human development have failed to represent them adequately or to address issues that may be unique to such groups. Within the last 10-20 years, researchers have begun to realize the limitations of generalizing broadly from traditional research, drawing only on the experiences of white, middle class (often male) samples, and the body of research investigating previously neglected populations is increasing dramatically. A four-year grant from NIMH (with supplemental funding from NSF) has allowed the Murray Research Center to take advantage of this growing body of work and begin to address past inadequacies by developing a special collection of studies with significant numbers of under-represented racial/ethnic groups in the targeted areas of mental health, health, and human development. The funds have allowed the staff, along with a distinguished advisory committee, to review over 600 studies for possible inclusion in the archive and identify those of most value, acquire and fully process 21 of these studies investigating a wide range of racial/ethnic populations, promote and facilitate the use of these data for new research, and gain permission to archive another set of important studies over the next four years. A new grant of four years would allow center staff to add 16-20 new studies to the archive, continue to publicize the availability of the data, and promote new research based on the center's Diversity Archive data. . The Henry A. Murray Research Center of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, is a social and behavioral sciences research center and data archive, with a special focus on qualitative, longitudinal research. A major goal of the center is to acquire data sets on a wide range of topics, which can then be made available to other researchers for secondary analysis, increasing the contribution of those data to our broader understanding of individual well-being and human development.
