Creating Community-Based Participatory Research in a Diverse Community: A Case Study

Abstract

Communities struggle to create research guidelines for ethical collaborative research within their locale. In Lawrence, Massachusetts (USA) a collaborative group of community members and academic researchers, known as the Mayor's Health Task Force Research Initiative Working Group, took on the challenge of creating guidelines for ethical community-based research. This case study of the Task Force's work addresses questions of research ethics in a diverse community where families struggle with few resources and face many health disparities, under the often-intrusive and unhelpful scrutiny of researchers from the many nearby major research universities. Representatives from the city, community organizations, and research universities developed a set of core ethical principles for research partnerships, a list of criteria for agreements between partners, and a model to help guide researchers and community members toward equitable and mutually beneficial research. This model can be generalized to similar other communities.

Results of a community-based survey of construction safety climate for Hispanic workers

“…The goals of this communityuniversity-labor partnership were to (1) form an equitable and mutually beneficial research partnership, (2) investigate the root causes of fall hazards and silica dust exposures affecting Hispanic construction workers, and (3) design and implement an intervention to improve occupational health based on the findings. 41 Known as the ''Immigrant City,'' Lawrence has a rich multi-ethnic and multicultural working class history with strong community networks, organizations, and small businesses. According to the U.S. Census, the Hispanic population of Lawrence, located in northeast Massachusetts, increased by 300% from 1980 to 1990.…”

Choice, power and perspective: The neglected question of who initiates engaged campus-community partnerships

“…From partnerships with tobacco workers to those with African American family farmers impacted by adjacent industrial hog confinement farms, these rural research partnerships attempt to create research partnerships that will directly address community needs (Grant & Wing 2004;Wing 2002). Some of these partnerships have taken place in large communities whereas others emphasise the work of mid-sized communities and mid-sized universities (Silka et al 2008). Tribal nations have been important innovators in the creation of these new forms of community-university research partnerships (Santiago-Rivera et al 1998;Ten Fingers 2005).…”

“…Communities have been described as frustrated by the ways that research universities work with them, increasingly arguing that they are taken advantage of by researchers who arrive at the community's door already knowing what they hope to extract (Silka et al 2008;Stoecker 2005). Academic researchers have been described as exploiting poor communities to advance their own personal research agendas (Ball 2005;Stoecker 2005).…”

“…As Sandy and Arguelles (2006, p. 21) point out: 'In the quest to gather knowledge and consider different perspectives, academic researchers have locked out many members of the very communities that we purport to study … we rarely invite the kind of direct input from community members that would inform our research designs or data analyses.' Problems of this sort are not rare (Silka et al 2008). They are common and sufficiently serious that they have become the focus of efforts to forestall them, such as development of templates for partnership contracts (Stoecker 2005).…”

Strengthening Knowledge Co-Production Capacity: Examining Interest in Community-University Partnerships

“…The majority of scholarship on public collaboration in resource management and community-university partnerships provides a retrospective rather than a prospective analytical approach by evaluating established participation events and partnerships (e.g., [29,34,39,40]; extant scholarship pays little attention to factors that constitute the foundation on which to build effective partnerships. In fact, even though some studies examining research partnerships may note in the partnership description why or how the partnership formed [11,41,42], they often do not provide an empirical evaluation of the conditions that influenced partnership development, and they rarely discuss how to start partnerships when no relationship with partners yet exists. This gap in the literature weakens collaborative capacity, as researchers and research teams often struggle with initiating partnerships.…”