Collaborative Workshops for Community Meaning-Making and Data Analyses: How Focus Groups Strengthen Data by Enhancing Understanding and Promoting Use.

Barbara L Allen,Maxime Jeanjean,Alison K Cohen,Johanna Lees

doi:10.3390/ijerph16183352

Abstract

Community-based participatory research is a growing approach, but often includes higher levels of community engagement in the research design and data collection stages than in the data interpretation stage. Involving study participants in this stage could further knowledge justice, science that aligns with and supports social justice agendas. This article reports on two community-based participatory environmental health surveys conducted between 2015 and 2019 in an industrial region near Marseille, France, and focuses specifically on our approach of organizing focus groups to directly involve residents and community stakeholders in the analysis and interpretation process. We found that, in these focus groups, residents triangulated across many different sources of information—study findings, local knowledge, and different types of expert knowledge—to reach conclusions about the health of their community and make recommendations for what should be done to improve community health outcomes. We conclude that involving residents in the data analysis and interpretation stage can promote epistemic justice and lead to final reports that are more useful to community stakeholders and decision-makers.

Highlights

Community-based participatory research (CBPR), in which people affected by the issues being studied participate in the research process, is on the rise [1] around the world, most of this approach’s growth has been in the United States of America (USA)
Once we presented the new preliminary health survey data in a public meeting in Saint-Martin-de-Crau in January 2019, we held a total of 19 focus groups there and in the original phase one towns of
We explained that the health study was not over, that preliminary dissemination of the data was only a first step in preparing the final report, and that we would be holding a series of focus groups to enable local people to collaborate in analyzing the epidemiological data

Summary

Introduction

This article documents a case study of one way in which community-based participatory research can lead to more meaningful research by engaging community members deeply in data analyses and interpretation. This has implications for the use of collaboratively created research evidence for broader public awareness and potential policy impacts in promoting environmental health [2]. In 2015, we began conducting a two-phase epidemiology-based community-based participatory health survey called Fos EPSEAL We held 28 focus groups with local residents to further analyze the data and to more comprehensively make relevant meaning from the sometimes-surprising statistical findings

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion