Promoting and Advocating for Ethical Community Engagement: Transparency in the Community-engaged Research Spectrum.

Abstract

Promoting and Advocating for Ethical Community Engagement:Transparency in the Community-engaged Research Spectrum Darcy Jones McMaughan, PhD, Suzanne M. Dolwick Grieb, PhD, MSPH, PhD, MSPH, Roula Kteily-Hawa, PhD, MSc, MPH, BEd, OCT, and Kent D. Key, PhD, MPH, BBA Keywords Power sharing, process issues, community-based participatory research, community health partnerships, community health research Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action emerged in 2007 as the first scholarly journal dedicated to community-based participatory research (CBPR) in response to its rapid growth. The journal aimed to promote adoption of CBPR, advance the science of CBPR, and provide evidence for the value of CBPR in advancing health equity and improving health outcomes.1 CBPR and other forms of community-engaged research have become increasingly common in health research, as communities, scholars, and funders recognize the importance of community engagement in improving health research, health services, health equity, and population health.2–7 Community-engaged health research synthesizes the knowledge and experience of academic, community, and practice partners to create culturally competent, rigorous, relevant, and beneficial health and social services.8,9 Since its inception, the journal has supported this synthesis and continued to disseminate research illustrating the importance of collaboration and partnership for connecting research, education, and action. With the growing expectation that institutional researchers* involve those affected by research, the journal has explored other approaches to collaboration and partnership beyond CBPR and to highlight research that models true community-engaged partnerships, however they are manifested.10–12 In our continued efforts to advance the field of community-engaged research and promote health equity, we believe that a nuanced understanding of the role of partnership in this process is critical. Thus, the journal remains committed to fostering transparency in the partnership process alongside the presentation of research methods, results, and translation to practice. Through this editorial, we hope to facilitate this transparency in the research published through the journal by reflecting on the continuum of community-engaged research and the role of context. We aim to provide guidance for authors, institutional researchers, and community members as they engage in and disseminate community-engaged research. Transparency is an invaluable aspect of determining the alignment of context and level of community engagement.13 Institutional researchers must be transparent with community members and funders and in their scholarly output to facilitate alignment. Scholars in the field of community engagement have worked toward addressing these issues by clarifying the community-engaged research continuum, [End Page 419] providing tools for institutional researchers to understand where they fall on the continuum and emphasizing the importance of context and transparency in their process. THE CONTINUUM Community-engaged research exists on a continuum from less engaged (like outreach and advisory committees) to the more collaborative and fully engaged (like shared leadership).13–15 In nonparticipatory research, institutional researchers assume the role of sole generators and arbiters of knowledge, hold all the power, and maintain control over the research decision-making processes, from setting the research agenda to controlling the diffusion of knowledge. The institutional researcher is central, and the role of community members is as a data source and an object of study. In community-engaged research, by contrast, the knowledge, power, and decision-making dynamics are central, with power shared between community members, practice partners, and institutional researchers along a continuum, starting with valuing input from community partners to full community ownership of research projects.16,17 Minimal engagement involves community members only on the 'bookends' of the research process—creating research questions, and interpretation and dissemination of findings,18 whereas full engagement is transversal and involves community members throughout the research process, from posing research questions and choosing the study design and analytic methods to the interpretation and dissemination of findings. Shared decision-making and equitable involvement of community members vary in degrees across community-engaged research and even within projects across time. 19–21 Given that community-engaged research truly is a continuum, there are no boxes into which we can neatly fit scholarly works. As a paradigm, community-engaged research is fluid in nature, always evolving and always open for interpretation. As Nicole Brown15 argues in her work on "The...