| Sumario: | In 1899, W. E. B. Du Bois warned in The Philadelphia Negro, the first sociological study produced in the United States, that persons creating statistical studies must be aware that, left unchecked, inaccuracies fueled by individual biases may distort their work as much as errors arising from flawed methodologies and observations. Building upon this early caveat and contemporary admonitions from sociologists Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the author examines two 1924 pamphlets, Health Work for Mothers in a Colored Community and Protecting the Mother and Child. Both were compiled and published from data created by the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor which, respectively, covered infant and maternal health demonstrations conducted among two neighborhood groupings of impoverished African American and British West Indian mothers and children, and Southern Italian mothers and children. When these pamphlets are compared against internal unpublished data, inconsistencies arise which may have resulted from then commonly held racially-gendered biases against blacks and Italians. In turn, these biases--coupled with the desire to publish efficacious outcomes--may have led the AICP to change the initial focus of its health experiment with black mothers and children from respiratory diseases to syphilis; to explain failed morbidity and mortality outcomes among Southern Italian infants by attacking mothers for their cultural preference for midwives," and, in both cases, to publish statistical data more positively than that contained in source materials. In sum, Du Bois' exhortation stands as powerfully today as over a century ago: even well-meaning researchers should check personal biases at the door before creating, conducting, and publishing statistical studies of racialized minority groups. To do otherwise may result in flawed data supporting the very biases that they may aim to overcome.
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