Some common elements of community are:
- Locus (a sense of place) - city, village, neighborhood, workplace, etc.
- Sharing (sharing common interests and perspectives)
- Joint action (joint actions that bring people together)
- Social ties (family, friends)
- Different lived experiences
- Community stakeholders on project steering committees and other deliberative and decision-making bodies
- Community advisory boards
- Compensation for the community's time and other contributions
- Dissemination of results back out to the community
- Takes time!
- Focus groups or interviews
- A research methodology
- A bolt-on
- A one-size fits all approach
- Appropriate for all research
- Recruitment of all populations
- A relinquishing of all insight or control by researchers
Community Challenges
- History of leaving community concerns and interests out of the research agenda, leading to caution on the part of communities
- Topics selected without determining if they addressed perceived needs of the community
- Studies conducted "on" communities; only community involvement was community members as research subjects
- No mechanisms for sharing research findings or continuing successful programs
- Communities felt they seldom received benefits from the research
- Time: research often an additional responsibility for already overworked individuals in organizations with their own mission and mandates to fulfill.
- Unclear distinctions between research and administrative change can lead to unrealistic expectations.
Academic Challenges
- Time: building partnerships, negotiating, planning and communicating are all time consuming activities over and above regular research opportunities
- The community-engaged research approach may not fit neatly within the academic status quo, leading to funding and promotion challenges
- Expectations for dissemination of results:
- Community members often expect to hear about results soon after the research is completed; don't want to wait the months or years it takes to appear in academic journals
- Some academic journals (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA) will not publish articles whose findings have been previously disseminated via newspaper, TV, etc.
- Given the above, how to give results to the community in a timely manner without compromising the researcher's ability to present findings in academic venues.
- Please see the resources on the Community Engagement Resources page for assistance in overcoming these challenges.
Meaningful community involvement can improve the research process itself, and therefore the ultimate findings:
- Develop research questions concerning health issues of concern to the community
- Help recruiting participants - people more likely to support the research and researchers when they understand the purpose of the research and how the results may affect them.
- Identify risks associated with participation and help develop appropriate ways to protect participants.
- Improves study and instrument design through community input to produce user friendly, relevant, accurate and valid practices and measures.
- Involvement in analysis and interpretation can provide important explanations of results, and local interpretation may provide ideas the researchers had not considered.
- Opportunity to build greater trust and respect between researchers and communities. This may lead to future research collaborations.
- Research may be more likely to lead to improvements in community health.
There is a growing awareness that traditional research approaches, while appropriate for some research questions, have failed to solve complex health problems exist within the context of people’s lives. A community-engaged research approach can enable researchers to conduct research and produce results, which may be directly translated to improve human health.