1. Understanding Community-Academic Partnerships
Module 1

2. Topics Community Community-Engaged Research
Community-Based Participatory Research
Relevance to PEER

3. Understanding Community-Academic Partnerships
Why is this important?
How is it relevant to me and my organization?

4. Community A group of people... Linked by social ties
Sharing common perspectives or interests
Who may or may not share a geographic location
Duke Center for Community Research

5. Community Members share a Common Characteristic or Goal
Examples:
Common culture or ethnic heritage
Where they live
Similar age
Speak the same language
Religion
Communities are not homogeneous and seldom speak with one voice
Duke Center for Community Research

6. Composition of Communities in Community Engaged Research
A community is typically comprised of:
community leaders
community organizations and agencies
community members
*These groups are outside of academia
These groups represent different aspects of a community and are likely to have different perspectives
Duke Center for Community Research

7. Community-Engaged Research
Based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) working definition of community-engaged research: “ the process of working collaboratively with and through groups of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations to address issues affecting the wellbeing of those people.”

8. History
Action Research: process of communities identifying their problems, planning, taking action, and then evaluating the results (Lewin, 1940’s)
Empowerment Education: emphasizes the equality of teachers and learners and the co-learning process (learning from each other) (Freire, 1970’s)
Incorporates principles of social justice and empowerment for marginalized communities
Duke Center for Community Research

9. Community-Engaged Research
A framework or approach for conducting research, rather than a research method
May be used with both qualitative and quantitative methods
Recognizes and builds on community strengths
Characterized by principles that guide the research
Requires partnership development
Duke Center for Community Research

10. What do community organizations bring to community-engaged research?
What do PEER fellows and their agencies bring that complements the faculty knowledge?

11. What Community Organizations bring to Community-Engaged Research
Community-based organizations have critical, useful and intimate understandings of the concerns, values, assets and activities in their communities.
When CBOs are engaged as partners in research, they bring these perspectives to help shape and refine study questions, implementation strategies, and data collection plans.
CBOs play an important role identifying how the study results may be applied to practice, and how the results can be used to shape future research directions.

12. What Academics bring to Community-Engaged Research
What do the academics bring to the table?

13. What’s in a name? community-engaged research*
community-based participatory research (CBPR)*
community-based research
community-partnered participatory research
action research
participatory research
mutual inquiry
community-academic collaborative research
Lively academic debate over the terms and approach – experts in the field have difficulty describing the differences which are sometimes subtle

14. Spectrum of Community-Engaged Research
More Intensive: Collaborating fully in all aspects of research, including defining study questions, writing the proposal, implementing the research project, analyzing the results and disseminating the findings (CBPR)
Moderately Intensive: Assisting with researcher-designed study; participant recruitment, data collection, providing feedback on aspects of study design & findings
Less Intensive: Assisting in discrete steps of a researcher-designed study, such as participant recruitment

15. Community-Engaged Research
More Intensive (CBPR): HIV prevention researchers collaborated with a group of sex workers in South Africa to co-develop an intervention these women could realistically use to protect themselves from contracting HIV. The sex workers collaborated with researchers to develop and implement a peer education program which provided information on protection methods they could use without losing customers and earnings.
Moderately Intensive: Beginning in the late 1980s at the Hispanic Health Council in Connecticut, anthropologists obtained community input in developing programs and designing services for injection drug users, pregnant women, and teens in the local Spanish speaking community.
Less Intensive: A needle exchange program was developed by academic investigators in New York City. Community members were hired to recruit participants into the program.
Singer M Campbell C Israel BA, et al 1998 Wallerstein N, Duran B. 2003
Duke Center for Community Research

16. What is Community-Based Participatory Research (CPBR)?
“CBPR is a collaborative approach to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community with the aim of combining knowledge and action for social change to improve community health and eliminate health disparities.”
Full collaboration in all aspects of research, including defining study questions, writing the proposal, implementing the research project, analyzing the results and disseminating the findings
Let me first re-state that CBPR is an approach or orientation to research. It is not a method.
CBPR was predated by several streams of applied research, and without getting into the details of that evolution, CBPR has become a term used to describe a continuum of approaches all of which have 3 things in common; participation, research and action.
This is the Kellogg Foundation Health Scholar’s definition of CBPR in the health field....
W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Health Scholar’s Program (2001)

17. CBPR emphasizes Mutual respect Co-learning
Individual and community capacity building
Balance between research and action
Israel, Schulz, Parker, and Becker 1998

18. Principles of CBPR Builds on community strengths and resources
Facilitates collaborative, equitable partnership in all research phases and involves an empowering and power-sharing process
Barbara Israel together with her academic and community partners have described 9 core principles of CBPR. University of Michigan Urban Research Center
The 9 principles drive the spirit of the research whereby rigorous science can be applied appropriately and therefore more successfully with underserved communities, leading to more successful interventions addressing health disparities.

19. Principles of CBPR
Emphasizes public health problems of local relevance and acknowledges multiple determinants of health and disease
Disseminates findings and knowledge to all partners

20. What CBPR is not
Studies where participants merely “come from the community”
Unengaged venue for recruiting subjects for clinical trials
Flip side….moving away from “traditional” approaches to research

21. Benefits of CBPR
Enhances relevance of research questions to the communities
Enhances reliability and validity of measurement instruments
Improves response rates
Enhances recruitment and retention
Strengthens interventions by incorporating cultural beliefs into scientifically valid approaches
CBPR has endorsement of NIH….

22. Benefits of CBPR
Increases accurate and culturally sensitive interpretation of findings
Facilitates effective dissemination of findings to impact public health and policy
Increases translation of evidence-based research into sustainable community change
Provides resources and benefits to communities
Joins partners with diverse expertise
Increases research trust

23. Why does PEER use the CBPR framework?

24. CBPR and PEER
PEER…
Seeks to develop the capacity of your organization and the capacity of academics to fully collaborate in community-engaged research
Offers an opportunity for academics and community-based organizations to engage together in a guided, facilitated, systematic program
Uses an applied learning approach
Capacity of your organization will be increased through your dissemination of CBPR, research methods, research study progress/findings, …

25. Thank You

26. Videos
Watch two videos of CBPR one from a researcher perspective and one from the community perspective
The videos are being edited down to about 15 – 20 minutes each.

27. What was the most important message for you from each video?
What was the most surprising thing you learned from each video?
Did the videos bring up important topics or issues (for fellows, organizations, or faculty partners) that you might encounter during PEER?