Collaborative Research Community Research Articles

Benefits, Barriers and Enablers of University—Community Research Collaboration: Input from Health and Social Service Agencies

Increasingly, it has become clear to social marketers and others that partnerships among organizations are needed to accomplish behavior change and achieve social objectives. While many still take an organization- centered approach, there has been a marked increase in the number of community-based collaborative research endeavors connecting academics and community agencies in mutual investigation of salient problems. Currently, much of the literature on these efforts is reported by academicians and reflects their perspectives or perceptions of agency viewpoints. More input is needed from the agency perspective to ensure a more balanced understanding of the significant role community partners play in the development and implementation of research that leads to improved health status of communities and other social objectives. To this end, focus groups were conducted to give community-based agencies the opportunity to share their insights and give their perspective regarding the benefits and barriers to effective collaboration. Representatives of agencies from the Chicago area with experience in collaborative research participated, and results were reviewed and corroborated by additional community agencies. The most common benefits sought by agencies were evaluation and needs assessment. Participants cite the failure of researchers and agencies to take the time to understand and try to meet each other's needs as the main barrier to effective collaborative efforts.

Improving collaboration between researchers and communities.

Active collaboration between communities and researchers is critical to developing appropriate public health research strategies that address community concerns. To capture the perspectives of inner-city Seattle communities about issues in community-researcher partnerships, Seattle Partners for Healthy Communities conducted interviews with community members from the ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Central and Southeast Seattle. The results suggest that effective community-researcher collaborations require a paradigm shift from traditional practices to an approach that involves: acknowledging community contributions, recruiting and training minority people to participate in research teams, improving communication, sharing power, and valuing respect and diversity.

Collaborative community research consortium: a model for HIV prevention.

In 1991, the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) at the University of California, San Francisco, set out to develop a model of community collaborative research that would bring the skills of science to the service of HIV prevention and the knowledge of service providers into the domain of research. Essential elements of the model were training for community-based organizations (CBOs) in research protocol writing, partnership between CBOs and CAPS researchers, program research funding, support to implement studies and analyze results, and a program manager to oversee the effort and foster the relationships between CBOs and researchers. In this article, the authors describe the CAPS model of consortium-based community collaborative research. They also introduce a set of papers, written by researchers and service providers, that describes collaborative research projects conducted by research institutions and CBOs and illustrates how collaboration can change both HIV prevention research and service.