Moving Parts and Balancing Acts: Building and Maintaining a Collaborative Community-Based Research Partnership in Detroit

Abstract

This paper describes the process of developing a research proposal for submission to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in collaboration with an urban public health agency. Two university-based researchers from different social science disciplines, each with previous experience in substance abuse research, invested significant time learning about the key questions and concerns of participants in several community-based programs, including clients, administrators and professionals from the county drug court, law enforcement, and substance abuse treatment and recovery services. They then developed a proposal which integrated their own academic interests with the questions and concerns that they uncovered in their preliminary research. After the proposal was written, the researchers presented it to an audience of community partners. Following the successful funding of the study, negotiations with various partners continued throughout the data collection process. The paper concludes with some suggestions for other researchers who may wish to engage in this type of applied, collaborative, interdisciplinary research.

The Cost of Recovery

“…We developed a mixed method research proposal designed to capture changes in social networks and economic resources across three phases of court-supervised treatment and recovery. Several previously published papers present further detail on the qualitative and quantitative findings of this larger study (Draus, Roddy, and Asabigi 2015;Draus et al 2014;Roddy et al 2013). The findings in this report offer quantitative evidence regarding income reduction due to discontinuation of sex work and expense reduction due to the discontinuation of drug use.…”

“…In other papers (Draus et al 2015; Draus et al 2014; Roddy et al 2013), we have examined the process of developing a collaborative research partnership to conduct this research, the street environments described by women exiting sex work, and the adjustment of women to treatment regimes. One conclusion shared by all of these papers is that resource constraints are a dominant factor shaping the behavior and choices of these women in each phase.…”

“…The same qualitative and quantitative instruments used in previous phases were applied in this phase. Although the qualitative findings are not discussed in this paper, the methods used and findings from the qualitative interviews and the combined qualitative/quantitative results are offered in other publications (Draus et al 2015; Draus et al 2014; Roddy et al 2013). Finally, additional interviews were conducted with women who had terminated from the program prior to graduation ( n = 8).…”

Making Sense of the Transition From the Detroit Streets to Drug Treatment

“…We developed our study after months of close interaction with SWP participants at a variety of levels: program and agency officials; employees such as substance abuse counselors, police, and drug court representatives; and current and former clients (Roddy, Draus, Asabigi, & White, 2013). The research proposal, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse in 2009, involved a proposed sample of 100 women at various stages of the treatment and recovery process.…”