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)
- Diversity
- 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 minority research participants
- A relinquishing of all insight or control by researchers
Community Barriers
- 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, advocacy and administrative change can lead to unrealistic expectations.
Academic Barriers
- 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 barriers.
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, culturally sensitive, 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 disparities. Health problems exist within the context of people’s lives, and the explanations will likely be found in the messy complexity of real life. A community-engaged research approach can enable researchers to conduct research and produce results, which may be directly translated to improve human health.