Seeing the community's perspective through multiple emic and etic vistas.

Abstract

Health impact assessment (HIA) researchers regularly use community input in their investigations to help them better understand local health issues. Community data is commonly associated with the lived experiences of local impacted residents known as 'emic' data. It is becoming more common practice for HIA researchers to access outside experts and stakeholders ('etic' data) during the community input phase of their investigations. Utilizing published international HIA data, I look at who HIA researchers invite when they seek to get 'community input' in their HIA investigations. The HIA database was generated from an internet investigation of published HIAs (in English) from 1999 to 2011 and focused particularly on single authored assessments that were conducted by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or universities. HIA researchers access a wide range of emic and etic community perspectives in their search for the 'community's view'. Government, NGO and university investigators access community perspectives differently, with university HIA researchers inviting more emic-oriented community vistas than both government and NGO researchers. University and government HIA investigators are more likely to invite multiple emic and etic community perspectives during their community participation projects than NGO researchers. NGO HIA investigators tend to either invite emic perspectives or etic perspectives for their community input with less mixing of the two views in a single project. The paper concludes with a discussion on how HIA researchers can frame the 'community's perspective' in their HIA investigations through a combination of both 'insider' and 'outsider' community input sampling strategies.