Abstract
The Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) has been well defined and widely applied to different study populations in a variety of health topic areas to address the urgency of translating research into practice, reducing health disparities, improving health equity, and advocating for health policy changes. The current study aims to systematically examine how CBPR has been applied to improving underserved refugee populations' health and identify the successes and challenges of CBPR utilization among refugees. A total of 930 peer-reviewed journal articles, reports, commentaries, theses, dissertations, books, and book chapters in English, retrieved from several major databases (e.g., EBSCO, ERIC, PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL Plus, and Google Scholar) were initially reviewed. Fourteen peer-reviewed journal articles were finally selected and analyzed using the theme analysis. Results showed that successes of utilization CBPR in refugee health studies were achieved in areas of shared learning, trust, recruitment, methodological rigor, advocacy, sociocultural determinants, dissemination/ sustainability, ethics, cultural competency, and stigma. However, the CBPR practice was also challenged by issues emerging from institutional culture and structure, clinical procedures, non-probability sampling, self-reflection, and repetition. Current literature suggests that overcoming these challenges requires both institutional restructure and policy changes, and changes in the focus of both internal and external funding mechanisms.
Highlights
The current literature has commonly defined Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) as “a collaborative research approach that is designed to ensure and establish structures for participation by communities affected by the issue being studied, representatives of organizations, and researchers in all aspects of the research process to improve health and well-being through taking action, including social change [1]” as well as to reduce health disparities [2,3,4]
What was discussed most by the current literature is that CBPR successfully enhanced the shared learning between academia and local refugee communities through frequent and open communications, including organizing community meetings, participating in networking events, and attending community cultural activities, and building the trust among them [14, 15, 21,22,23,24,25, 27]
A review of ethical research on refugee communities and the use of CBPR indicated that the involvement of the Community Advisory Board (CAB) in the research “contributed to minimizing risks of the study, as well as ensuring that the overall assessment of benefits outweighed the risks” [14]
Summary
The current literature has commonly defined Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) as “a collaborative research approach that is designed to ensure and establish structures for participation by communities affected by the issue being studied, representatives of organizations, and researchers in all aspects of the research process to improve health and well-being through taking action, including social change [1]” as well as to reduce health disparities [2,3,4]. It further involves “co-learning and reciprocal transfer of expertise shared decision-making power, and mutual ownership of the processes and products of the research enterprise [1].”. It addresses the challenges of translational research in the ways of (a) increasing the study’s generalizability through engaging community
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