Measuring Community‐Engaged Research Contexts, Processes, and Outcomes: A Mapping Review

Abstract

Community‐engaged research (CEnR) engenders meaningful academic‐community partnerships to improve research quality and health outcomes. CEnR has increasingly been adopted by health care systems, funders, and communities looking for solutions to intractable problems. It has been difficult to systematically measure CEnR's impact, as most evaluations focus on project‐specific outcomes. Similarly, partners have struggled with identifying appropriate measures to assess outcomes of interest. To make a case for CEnR's value, we must demonstrate the impacts of CEnR over time. We compiled recent measures and developed an interactive data visualization to facilitate more consistent measurement of CEnR's theoretical domains. Context Community‐engaged research (CEnR) aims to engender meaningful academic‐community partnerships to increase research quality and impact, improve individual and community health, and build capacity for uptake of evidence‐based practices. Given the urgency to solve society's pressing public health problems and increasing competition for funding, it is important to demonstrate CEnR's value. Most evaluations focus on project‐specific outcomes, making it difficult to demonstrate CEnR's broader impact. Moreover, it is challenging for partnerships to identify assessments of interest beyond process measures. We conducted a mapping review to help partnerships find and select measures to evaluate CEnR projects and to characterize areas where further development of measures is needed. Methods We searched electronic bibliographic databases using relevant search terms from 2009 to 2018 and scanned CEnR projects to identify unpublished measures. Through review and reduction, we found 69 measures of CEnR's context, process, or outcomes that are potentially generalizable beyond a specific health condition or population. We abstracted data from descriptions of each measure to catalog purpose, aim (context, process, or outcome), and specific domains being measured. Findings We identified 28 measures of the conditions under which CEnR is conducted and factors to support effective academic‐community collaboration (context); 43 measures evaluating constructs such as group dynamics and trust (process); and 43 measures of impacts such as benefits and challenges of CEnR participation and system and capacity changes (outcomes). Conclusions We found substantial variation in how academic‐community partnerships conceptualize and define even similar domains. Achieving more consistency in how partnerships evaluate key constructs could reduce measurement confusion apparent in the literature. A hybrid approach whereby partnerships discuss common metrics and develop locally important measures can address CEnR's multiple goals. Our accessible data visualization serves as a convenient resource to support partnerships’ evaluation goals and may help to build the evidence base for CEnR through the use of common measures across studies.

Scales of Practices and Outcomes for Community‐Engaged Research

“…the translation of research amidst a noted lack of valid and reliable scales of community engagement to facilitate robust evaluation (Ahmed et al, 2019;Boivin et al, 2018;Sprague Martinez et al, 2018). Indeed, researchers have argued that the science of CPBR/CEnR (i.e., why it works and under what conditions) can only be advanced with strong measurement of key constructs, though reviews of engagement constructs over the past decade have continued to find that many scales employed in CEnR/CBPR studies lack basic psychometric properties (Boivin et al, 2018;Luger et al, 2020;Sandoval et al, 2012;Tigges et al, 2019). There are some exceptions to this finding (Hall et al, 2008;Oetzel et al, 2015;Treitler et al, 2018), and the current study further contributes opportunities to measure and evaluate various aspects of community engagement with robust scales.…”

“…Overall, this study further establishes measurement validity of scales that have been developed through a long-term and rigorous process to help advance the practice and science of CBPR and CEnR to achieve goals of health and social equity, while highlighting the importance of commitments to collective empowerment. Collectively, our seven scales provide an example of the type of theoretical and empirical foundation that Luger et al (2020) called for to strengthen the measurement foundation of CEnR.…”

“…However, few were psychometrically tested and validated, thus confirming the need for more valid, reliable measures of collaboration and the general lack of tools available. In their mapping review, Luger et al (2020) identified 28 measures of context (CEnR conditions and supportive factors for academic/community collaboration), 43 measures of process (group dynamics and trust), and 43 measures of outcomes (benefits/challenges of CEnR impacts). The authors found significant variation in how CEnR partnerships defined and conceptualized these domains, with over half of identified measures being applied to more than one domain.…”

Utilizing Participatory Research to Engage Underserved Populations to Improve Health-Related Outcomes in Delaware

“…Impacts of community-based participatory research on health-related outcomes are less established in the literature [ 27 ]. This secondary analysis is one of few reporting on anthropometrics and health behaviors [ 17 , 19 ].…”

Patient engagement in fertility research: bench research, ethics, and social justice

“…Recently, ART researchers contacted a Patient Engagement Studio (PES) regarding their ethically complex study, Embryo+™. With funding organizations increasingly requiring PPI, in order to reduce the tokenization of PPI and to determine if the engagement with patients on a project has been meaningful, it is important to review and evaluate the engagement process [ 8 ]. Additionally, it is also important to determine the impact of the engagement on the study [ 9 ].…”