Strengthening Collaborative Community and Research Partnership Decision-Making Processes to Achieve Health Equity

Abstract

Collaborative community and academic partner decision-making is imperative for efforts to reduce structural racism and achieve health equity. It is essential to intentionally integrate methods and tools that will help ensure efficient, collaborative, and clear decision-making among community and research partners. The RAPID® decision-making framework is one of these tools, and it is an acronym that stands for Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, and Decide. RAPID® assigns roles in the decision-making process to explicitly clarify who provides input or feedback on a decision, who decides, and who implements the decision. The RAPID® allows diverse, vital partners to share their expertise and provide direction at critical moments during the research process. This collaborative process activates community power and ensures that the research questions will benefit the communities we seek to serve. Our brief details a case example of how we used the RAPID® to co-create and revise data collection protocols and instruments for a research project to understand how community benefits agreements disrupt the pathways from residential segregation to health disparities in disinvested communities. We will share what we learned from implementing the RAPID® and recommendations for future adoption