Collaborative Workshops for Community Meaning-Making and Data Analyses: How Focus Groups Strengthen Data by Enhancing Understanding and Promoting Use

Abstract

Community-based participatory research is a growing approach, but often includes higher levels of community engagement in the research design and data collection stages than in the data interpretation stage. Involving study participants in this stage could further knowledge justice, science that aligns with and supports social justice agendas. This article reports on two community-based participatory environmental health surveys conducted between 2015 and 2019 in an industrial region near Marseille, France, and focuses specifically on our approach of organizing focus groups to directly involve residents and community stakeholders in the analysis and interpretation process. We found that, in these focus groups, residents triangulated across many different sources of information—study findings, local knowledge, and different types of expert knowledge—to reach conclusions about the health of their community and make recommendations for what should be done to improve community health outcomes. We conclude that involving residents in the data analysis and interpretation stage can promote epistemic justice and lead to final reports that are more useful to community stakeholders and decision-makers.

“We Keep Each Other Safe”: San Francisco Bay Area Community-Based Organizations Respond to Enduring Crises in the COVID-19 Era

“…We re-reviewed the transcripts to conduct directed coding to capture any instances that we may have missed. Finally, following community-engaged research principles (Allen et al 2019;Cashman et al 2008), we shared a draft article with a subset of interviewees in the summer of 2021 to ground-truth our findings and generate dialogue, and used their engaging feedback and comments to thicken our analysis; these participants received an additional $100 gift certificate. Over-all, these informants reported that the manuscript resonated with and affirmed their experiences during the pandemic while offering important conceptual suggestions that we engaged with in our revisions.…”

Selecting Indicators to Monitor and Assess Environmental Health in a Portuguese Urban Setting: A Participatory Approach

“…Methods for selecting indicators vary from statistical and causal models [ 15 ] to systematic reviews of the literature [ 24 , 25 ] and participatory processes [ 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ]. The use of participatory processes in EH research is especially important because of the complexity of the EH concept and of the interactions between EH determinants and health outcomes, as well as because of the importance of engaging experts with different knowledge in expressing their views and discussing local EH problems [ 30 , 31 ]. The perception of the complexity and specificities of urban settings also makes it crucial to consider a variety of experts’ views to increase the probability that the selected indicators will be considered credible, scientific, and relevant to EH interventions [ 32 ].…”