Engage for Equity: A Long-Term Study of Community-Based Participatory Research and Community-Engaged Research Practices and Outcomes

Abstract

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) and community-engaged research have been established in the past 25 years as valued research approaches within health education, public health, and other health and social sciences for their effectiveness in reducing inequities. While early literature focused on partnering principles and processes, within the past decade, individual studies, as well as systematic reviews, have increasingly documented outcomes in community support and empowerment, sustained partnerships, healthier behaviors, policy changes, and health improvements. Despite enhanced focus on research and health outcomes, the science lags behind the practice. CBPR partnering pathways that result in outcomes remain little understood, with few studies documenting best practices. Since 2006, the University of New Mexico Center for Participatory Research with the University of Washington’s Indigenous Wellness Research Institute and partners across the country has engaged in targeted investigations to fill this gap in the science. Our inquiry, spanning three stages of National Institutes of Health funding, has sought to identify which partnering practices, under which contexts and conditions, have capacity to contribute to health, research, and community outcomes. This article presents the research design of our current grant, Engage for Equity, including its history, social justice principles, theoretical bases, measures, intervention tools and resources, and preliminary findings about collective empowerment as our middle range theory of change. We end with lessons learned and recommendations for partnerships to engage in collective reflexive practice to strengthen internal power-sharing and capacity to reach health and social equity outcomes.

Engage for Equity: The Role of Trust and Synergy in Community-Based Participatory Research

“…The CES, which includes a variety of measures of CBPR processes and outcomes, was sent to 620 partners with a 69% response rate. Data presented in this article includes 381 responses from 138 projects that met the inclusion criteria of having nonmissing responses to at least 75% of core CES items and responding to the trust typology item (Wallerstein et al, 2020). The University of New Mexico Institutional Review Board approved the study protocol and instrumentation (HRPO#16-098).…”

Engage for Equity: Development of Community-Based Participatory Research Tools

“…The tools were provided to 25 research partnerships, participating in one of three, 2-day, workshops that took place in the Fall 2017. These 25 partnerships were randomly selected from a sample of 68 partnerships funded in 2015, identified from community-engagement or CBPR-oriented abstracts published in the NIH RePORTer database (Dickson et al, 2020; Wallerstein et al, 2020). To qualify for selection, teams had to have completed two internet surveys, one for the principal investigator and one for all community and academic partners.…”

“…These previous studies enabled quantitative and qualitative data analyses, which provided the theory, and grounded the theory in specific practices, for the present E2 study (Wallerstein et al, 2020). The CBPR conceptual model (Figure 1) served as the overarching orienting framework for tool development and testing.…”

Commentary on Community-Based Participatory Research and Community Engaged Research in Health for Journal of Participatory Research Methods

“…A structural equation model identified two pathways of partnering processes: relational practices such as trust, dialogue, or participatory decision-making; and structural practices, such as formal agreements and sharing of resources (Oetzel et al, 2018). In the current phase, Engage for Equity (2015-2021), we have refined measures and surveyed another 179 federally-funded CEnR/ CBPR partnerships, and 36 new partnerships; codified our own theoretical emancipatory approach; and provided workshops and web access Commentary on Community-Based Participatory Research and Community Engaged Research in Health for Journal of Participatory... (http://engageforequity.org) 1 to qualitative and quantitative collective reflection tools to strengthen partnerships in reaching their goals Wallerstein et al, 2020). We have seen the use and adaptation of the CBPR conceptual model being disseminated internationally, with a recent chapter showing examples from Australia, Sweden, Nicaragua, and the United States (Wallerstein et al, 2021).…”

“…With the back-drop of historic research abuse and mistrust of research by communities, CBPR has embraced shared leadership and power, and adds a further dimension of "community-driven" research, both of which fit within the Southern tradition of challenging power inequities. CBPR, as well as participatory-action research (PAR) within the field of education, has increasingly called for self-reflection by practitioners on their own positionalities of power and privilege in order to challenge traditional hierarchies of academics and community/ practitioner stakeholders (Fine, 2018;Wallerstein, Muhammad, et al, 2019;Wallerstein et al, 2020). The creation of the ICPHR in 2009 enabled steering committee members to Commentary on Community-Based Participatory Research and Community Engaged Research in Health for Journal of Participatory...…”