Despite significant financial support for health equity research, health and health care disparities persist. To date, no formal analysis of trends and gaps in funded disparities-focused research has been conducted to ensure targeted investments focus on priority populations, outcomes, and building an evidence base for solutions to health and health care inequities. Health equity researchers, their funders, and members of the communities whose health they seek to improve could benefit from the identification of research gaps so efforts could be allocated to ensure research-identified solutions are generalizable to the diverse populations that suffer from health inequities. This report presents results of a qualitative analysis of the “Health Services Research Projects in Progress” database centered on disparities-focused health services research (HSR) funded between 2007 and 2011. The report describes the funders and funding recipients of health disparities-focused HSR, gaps in the populations and outcomes studied, and examines five-year trends in the “evolution” of disparities research from documenting inequities, to investigating causal mechanisms, to identifying solutions. (abbreviated author introduction)
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