Designing and Facilitating Collaborative Research Design and Data Analysis Workshops: Lessons Learned in the Healthy Neighborhoods Study.

Andrew Binet,Leigh Carroll,Mariana Arcaya,Vedette Gavin

doi:10.3390/ijerph16030324

Abstract

One impediment to expanding the prevalence and quality of community-engaged research is a shortage of instructive resources for collaboratively designing research instruments and analyzing data with community members. This article describes how a consortium of community residents, grassroots community organizations, and academic and public institutions implemented collaborative research design and data analysis processes as part of a participatory action research (PAR) study investigating the relationship between neighborhoods and health in the greater Boston area. We report how nine different groups of community residents were engaged in developing a multi-dimensional survey instrument, generating and testing hypotheses, and interpreting descriptive statistics and preliminary findings. We conclude by reflecting on the importance of balancing planned strategies for building and sustaining resident engagement with improvisational facilitation that is responsive to residents’ characteristics, interests and needs in the design and execution of collaborative research design and data analysis processes.

Highlights

Community-engaged, action-oriented research approaches involve communities that are impacted by the issues being studied
Brown et al [12] demonstrate that the unfamiliarity of many institutional review boards (IRB) with community-based participatory research (CBPR) can lead to misunderstandings, obstacles, and delays to research
We report on how nine different groups of community residents were engaged in developing a shared survey instrument, and how they were involved in generating and testing hypotheses and interpreting descriptive statistics and preliminary findings, processes for which there is a shortage of instructive, step-by-step guidance in the existing literature

Summary

Introduction

Community-engaged, action-oriented research approaches involve communities that are impacted by the issues being studied. PAR, CBPR, and other community-engaged research approaches represent a small—albeit growing—share of social science research, in part because participatory approaches to research can be more time-consuming, financially costly, risky, and challenging to manage than conventional approaches [3,11]. These relative disadvantages are more a product of how research has been institutionalized than of problems inherent to the engagement of community members in research. 25 min Cluster workshop, full group (12–15 people).

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Discussion

Conclusion