Enhancing the Rigor of Antiracist Research: Methodological Strategies

A ntiracism is a long-standing and foundational commitment of the social work profession.This commitment has become increasingly urgent in response to the intensification of racism in U.S. society over the past decade.Contributing events include police violence against Black individuals-such as the killings of Michael Brown in 2014 (Wikipedia, 2025) and George Floyd in 2020 (Bunn, 2025)the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic (Han et al., 2022), and the recent Israel-Hamas war, which has fueled antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate crimes (Vision of Humanity, 2025).It is of paramount importance to enhance the rigor of antiracist research.Two key approaches are central to this enhancement: one is to develop new methods explicitly designed to address injustice and the systemic biases embedded in racism; the other is to leverage existing scientific methods to confront the complex challenges inherent in antiracist scholarship.In this context, rigor is not merely a matter of technical precision-it is foundational to producing credible, actionable, and transformative knowledge.Without methodological rigor, antiracist research risks being dismissed as anecdotal, ideologically driven, or lacking in generalizability.Strengthening the scientific basis of this body of work can enhance its legitimacy in policy and practice settings, better inform intervention and systems-change efforts, and more effectively challenge dominant paradigms that perpetuate racial inequities.Moreover, rigorous methods can uncover hidden patterns of structural racism and illuminate the mechanisms through which it operates across systems and populations.