In my research paper, I am investigating racial disparities related to COVID-19 vaccination in the United States. According to multiple pieces of researches, racial minorities were disproportionately affected by the coronavirus due to multiple factors, including structural racism, limited access to health care, multiple comorbidities, poor income, and the unavailability of distant work. At the same time, I am arguing that disparities on the basis of race still exist, and they may be observed in relation to vaccination as well. I aim to prepare an in-depth analysis of this issue, and in my search for reliable literature, I found a peer-reviewed scientific article written by Agarwal et al. (2021) entitled “Socioeconomic privilege and political ideology are associated with racial disparity in COVID-19 vaccination.” As a matter of fact, I found it to be a highly reliable and useful source for my work due to its information relevance and accuracy, the scope of research, and valid findings.
First of all, there are multiple facts that determine the credibility of this article. It was edited, approved, and published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), one of the most-cited and renowned multidisciplinary scientific journals in the world. In addition, the authors of this article are competent and experienced scientists in the field of social sciences who published a considerable number of other articles in peer-reviewed journals. The article was published this year, and all data are from this year as well – these facts demonstrate information actuality as, by this time, almost half of US adult citizens had been fully or partly vaccinated. The scope of this research is another factor that contributes to the article’s credibility. According to the authors, their analysis has covered more than 170.6 million lives from 756 US counties – thus, data of almost 52% of the population were considered (Agarwal et al., 2021). All information related to COVID-19 vaccination was collected from the websites of public health departments.
The usefulness of this article for my research is explained by its authors’ thorough examination of factors that may cause racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccination. They estimated the impact of health care quality and access, education quality and access, economic stability, neighborhood environment, and community and social context on COVID-19 vaccination rates and associated disparities. According to the results of the research, disparities are mostly associated with education, median income, and political ideology, while vaccine hesitancy, home IT rate, and vehicle ownership rate have the smallest impact (Agarwal et al., 2021). In addition, counties “with a greater proportion of Black residents have less disparity in COVID-19 vaccination rates” (Agarwal et al., 2021, p. 3). Finally, political preferences affect disparities as well as according to a February 2021 poll, Republicans had a lower willingness to be vaccinated in comparison with Democrats (Agarwal et al., 2021). Additional factors included individual attitudes to vaccination, racism, and medical mistrust.
In conclusion, I should say that this source may be regarded as highly credible and useful for my research. Its general expediency is determined by the fact that the risk of the coronavirus-related pandemic will still be high in the future. Thus, it is essential to identify factors that contribute to disparities for their minimization. I will definitely use this source to add information concerning the connection between race and these factors.
Reflection Questions
- What types of questions did you ask yourself when evaluating the credibility and usefulness of your source? When evaluating my source, I asked myself where this source was published and whether it is scientific or not. In addition, I evaluated how this source corresponded with the topic of my research.
- How do you feel this evaluation practice will help you as you continue to move through the research process? As a matter of fact, the research process requires additional sources of information. At the same time, this evaluation helps to elaborate on a particular algorithm that may be applied to other sources to determine their credibility and usefulness.
Reference
Agarwal, R., Dugas, M., Ramaprasad, J., Luo, J., Li, G., & Gao, G. (2021). Socioeconomic privilege and political ideology are associated with racial disparity in COVID-19 vaccination. PNAS, 118(33), 1-3.