Collaborative Research Community Research Articles

Using participatory mapping to inform a community-randomized trial of HIV counseling and testing.

Participatory mapping and transect walks were used to inform the research and intervention design and to begin building community relations in preparation for Project Accept, a community-randomized trial sponsored by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). NIMH Project Accept is being conducted in five sites within four countries including Thailand, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Tanzania. Results from the mapping exercises informed decisions about the research design such as defining community boundaries, and identifying appropriate criteria for matching community pairs for the trial. The mapping also informed intervention related decisions such as where to situate the services. The participatory methods enabled each site to develop an understanding of the communities that could not have been derived from existing data or data collected through standard data collection techniques. Furthermore, the methods lay the foundation for collaborative community research partnerships.

Enabling scientific teamwork

The Computer Supported Collaborative Work research community has identifiedthat the technology used to support distributed teams of researchers, such as email, instantmessaging, and conferencing environments, are not enough. Building from a list of areas whereit is believed technology can help support distributed teams, we have divided our efforts intosupport of asynchronous and synchronous activities. This paper will describe two of our recentefforts to improve the productivity of distributed science teams. One effort focused onsupporting the management and tracking of milestones and results, with the hope of helpingmanage information overload. The second effort focused on providing an environment thatsupports real-time analysis of data. Both of these efforts are seen as add-ons to the existingcollaborative infrastructure, developed to enhance the experience of teams working at adistance by removing barriers to effective communication.

Supporting and developing a collaborative research community

Supporting and developing a collaborative research community

Can the Differences Between Education and Neuroscience be Overcome by Mind, Brain, and Education?

ABSTRACT— The new field of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE)—sometimes called educational neuroscience—is posited as a mediator between neuroscience and education. Several foundational concerns, however, can be raised about this emerging field. The differences between neuroscience and education are many, including differences in their histories, philosophies, and epistemologies. Historically, science and education have demonstrated separate, but interwoven, influences on society; philosophically, the values by which they operate are often in opposition; and epistemologically, the fields have relied on different conceptualizations of knowledge. Discussion about these differences has been largely absent in attempts to promote MBE. Two steps are proposed to respond to this omission. First, encouraging discussion about disciplinary differences and assumptions may enable better understanding between disciplines and facilitate the establishment of a more collaborative research community. Second, a transdisciplinary framework that focuses on salient issues of interest across disciplines should be considered. Transdisciplinarity aims for the creation of an inclusive research environment that transcends traditional disciplinary approaches to complex problems. This article initiates an exploration of disciplinary differences and proposes commitment to transdisciplinarity as a guiding principle that may increase the viability of MBE as a mediating field between neuroscience and education.

Assessing Process and Outcomes: Evaluating Community-Based Participatory Research

The California Breast Cancer Research Program (CBCRP) Community Research Collaboration (CRC) Awards fund research projects conducted by partnerships between community members and academically trained research scientists. We sought to determine the relationship, if any, between the collaborative process of conducting the CRC projects and reported outcomes. Community and academic researchers from the first seven CRC full award projects were interviewed in one-on-one, standardized, semistructured telephone interviews. Twelve of thirteen eligible community partners and all nine eligible academic partners were interviewed (some teams had multiple community or academic partners). Interview questions covered four major types of outcomes (improved methodology [four items], benefited community [sixitems], benefited researchers [three items], or influenced health services and policy [five items]) and three major aspects of the partnership (collaboration among partners [three items], group dynamics [five items], and community involvement [two items]). Process and outcome scores for each team were compared using a scatter plot graph. Teams were most effective at improving the quality of research methodology, providing benefits to the participating community agency, and answering questions important to the communities involved. Areas of difficulty for the teams included collaborative data analysis, power sharing, and managing the impact of turnover. Although the projects varied in the measures of the partnership process, the three teams that had the highest outcome scores also had the highest scores for the partnership process. Although the relationship between process and outcomes is not necessarily causal, these results suggest an association worthy of further investigation.

Speaking for ourselves

As an Assistant Professor in Community Economic and Social Development (CESD) at Algoma University College, Ontario, Canada and a member of Asopricor Holistic Association, Cundinamarca, Colombia, respectively, the authors have engaged in an ongoing dialogue regarding the inherent contradictions of forming a North—South, university—community research collaboration. For those who have engaged in and/or read about action research, the questions addressed in this article are familiar: How can we maintain respectful relations between us? How can we ensure the project respects local knowledge? How can we ensure the ownership of the new knowledge created by the project remains with the collective? How can we balance the power dynamics between ourselves, and between the organizations involved? What the article offers, is a dialogical reflection on how these challenges are being met within this particular project. It examines the development of a common set of values and beliefs that emerge as the researchers attempt to engage within the `ethical space' (Ermine, 2005) necessary for the development of a respectful collaboration. The article explores and develops a series of questions for researchers to consider as they struggle to find common ground where such an exchange, crossing cultural and power divides, can occur.

Conducting HIV Interventions for Asian Pacific Islander Men Who Have Sex With Men: Challenges and Compromises in Community Collaborative Research

This article describes the process of implementing a community collaborative HIV prevention intervention research project targeting Asian and Pacific Islander (API) men who have sex with men (MSM). This article traces the genesis of the project--which linked university researchers with an API--focused community based organization--starting from its original concept and study design to the actual implementation and evaluation. This project provides a case study for analyzing the challenges and barriers encountered in community collaborative HIV intervention. Strategies and best practices for building community capacity in evaluation research are provided, and theoretical considerations for conducting community-based health interventions are raised.

Best Practices for Community Collaborative Research

The articles in this issue address the role community collaborative research can play in the development of prevention evaluation research and intervention capacity on a local level through community organizations and/or local health departments. The purpose of this conclusion is summarize crosscutting issues and best practices across projects, provide linkages with Community Collaborative Research Initiative (CCRI) outputs on a statewide level through infrastructure developed through the partnerships between public health and research systems, and locate both within the evaluation capacity building (ECB) framework presented in the introduction to this issue.

Building Capacity through Partnerships: The Use of Community Collaborative Evaluation and Research to Build Capacity for HIV/AIDS Prevention

The purpose of this special issue is to address the role community collaborative research can play in the development of prevention evaluation research and intervention capacity on a local level through community organizations and/or local health departments and on a statewide level through infrastructure developed through collaboration between public health and research systems. This issue will focus on projects from the California Collaborative Research Initiative (CCRI)—a partnership between the California State Office of AIDS (OA) and the Universitywide AIDS Research Program (UARP) at the University of California, Office of the President. Projects included in this special issue demonstrate the need for community research; illustrate strategies for using community collaborations as a process and mechanism for building multidirectional capacity for researcher, local health departments, CBOs and communities; and locate capacity building in the context of intervention evaluation. In a concluding article, best practices for collaboration and evaluation capacity building from projects will be synthesized and linked with statewide evaluation systems designed to illustrate the translation of local capacity into statewide support mechanisms. To establish a context for projects presented, the following introduction will provide a conceptual framework for the role of collaborative research as a capacity-building mechanism, locate the California community collaborative initiative within this framework, and outline the premise, contribution, and organizational structure of this special issue.

For Your Information: April 2005

The NCTM Research Catalyst conference documented here brought together researchers, policymakers, mathematicians, and mathematics educators to “generate and catalyze” research on the impact of standards-based teaching and learning and to begin to build a collaborative research community.

Sexual Health Protection, Culture and Community: Contributions of Anthropology to Community Health Education Approaches: An Introduction

The role of culture in community health education has become increasingly visible in the past two decades. This new trend has been accompanied by a more active participation of anthropologists in the development of health education research and interventions and a global diffusion of qualitative methodologies with a focus on local cultures for community intervention planning [1-6]. It is within this emerging trend that the co-editors situate this special issue of the International Quarterly of Community Health Education. The articles in this issue represent diverse examples of community-based research and intervention efforts undertaken by faculty and practitioners from several disciplines on the subject of sexual decision making and health education implications. Three themes run through this collection: 1) the interface of health-education culture and community; 2) the insufficiency of rational decision-making models for explaining outcomes in heterogeneous communities; and 3) the value of qualitative tools that build community research collaboration to document peoples experiences with sexual health protection. (excerpt)

Collaborative proteomics framework with XML databases and an integrated XML viewer for 2DPAGE

SUMMARY We developed a collaborative proteomics framework with XML-based 2DPAGE database and XML viewer optimized for the proteome database. Prior to the development of the framework, we optimized the XML format of our TMIG-XML-2DPAGE database for efficient data sharing in a collaborative research community. The data format is comprised with 2 layers of 2-D gel map and spot protein information. The function of clickable imagemap for representing spot protein information is available both in the proteome data management system with PHP and in the XML viewer with Object Pascal. Individual spots on an experimental 2-D gel image are easily matched to corresponding spots on a standard 2-D gel map in the TMIG-XML-2DPAGE database using the function of the XML viewer.

Ethics in Environmental Health

When it comes to the ethics of health research, “there’s been a presumption that ethicists and ethics committees will be in charge and solve ethical problems,” says Ann Cook, director of the National Rural Bioethics Project at the University of Montana in Missoula. More and more, however, environmental health researchers are realizing their need to be directly involved in the ethics questions facing them and their community partners. Cook describes ethics as “something that everyone in the community has a stake in and needs to know about.” The NIEHS and the National Human Genome Research Institute agree. In 2002 the two institutes launched a grants program called Partnerships to Address Ethical Challenges in Environmental Health, which aims to tackle these issues by promoting community–researcher collaborations. As part of the larger NIEHS Environmental Justice Program framework, the Partnerships program seeks to remedy the unequal burden borne by socioeconomically disadvantaged persons in terms of residential exposure to greater-than-acceptable levels of environmental pollution, occupational exposure to hazardous substances, and fewer civic benefits such as sewage and water treatment. Chief among ethical concerns for such populations is ensuring that research studies are designed and conducted with the involvement of those being studied rather than regarding them simply as study subjects. Program grantees, including Cook’s team, receive up to $200,000 annually for five years to investigate environmental ills in a community, survey residents’ attitudes about both local environmental problems and health studies in general, and develop educational campaigns to meet local needs. Grantee teams must include an environmental health scientist, a social scientist or expert on issues such as racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic discrimination, and a representative from a local community organization that works on environmental issues. A variety of groups, from environmental organizations to schools of public health, receive funding through the Partnerships program. Grantees are now halfway through their projects and ready to discuss some of their findings—and frustrations.

Investigations into the Indoor Environment and Respiratory Health in Boston Public Housing

The self-reported prevalence of asthma in the United States increased by 75% from 1980 to 1994, a trend found to be significant and evident in every region of the country. The increase was most marked in children from birth to 14 years of age; and growing evidence indicates that, as with lead poisoning, inner-city and urban populations are most at risk. Attention has turned to the role of indoor environmental risk factors, especially in homes and schools. Such factors include moisture and mold growth, pest infestation, dust mites, the building envelope, heating systems, inadequate Ventilation, nitrogen dioxide, and environmental tobacco smoke. The Healthy Public Housing Initiative (HPHI) is a Boston-based communitycentered research and intervention project designed to engage Boston Housing Authority residents in a collaborative process to improve respiratory health, quality of life, building conditions, and building maintenance in public housing. This article summarizes the significant research findings from four pilot studies in housing developments that laid the foundation for the larger HPHI asthma-related environmental intervention study. The research design for the pilot projects is informed by principles of community-collaborative research. The strengths of this model of research for our work are also discussed.

Funding community-based participatory research: lessons learned

The California Breast Cancer Research Program (CBCRP) was created to fund innovative breast cancer research specifically addressing the needs of women in California. Beginning in 1997, the Program launched the Community Research Collaboration (CRC) Program, a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) program intended to foster community-researcher collaboration on all aspects of the research process, essentially placing the community in the center of the research paradigm. The CBCRP conducted a process evaluation of the CRC Program to assess success and identify areas for improvement. The evaluation included community-researcher collaborations and the award process. The evaluation identified successes that speak to the effectiveness of the collaboration concept: empowering women to formulate and initiate research; involving underserved and hard-to-reach populations; addressing important and useful research questions; increasing communities' skills and expertise, and enabling lasting collaborations. The greatest weakness identified was the involvement of the broader community (beyond the group/organization involved) in these projects. The evaluation identified strengths in CBCRP's award process, including technical assistance and feedback, the emphasis on collaboration in the review process, and awarding funds directly to community groups. Barriers included: power imbalances due to the community's lack of experience in the dominant research funding culture; funding limits and award delays; and the increased service demand beyond the funding limits of the award that is created. The CBCRP has been able to incorporate many of the evaluation findings to improve the CRC Program.

Commentary: The Conspicuous Invisibility of Black Ways of Being: Missing Data in New Models of Children's Mental Health

The work of Atkins et al. (2003) and the theme of community collaboration in three different research projects is remarkably consistent, and challenges the field of evidence-based school mental health to determine if and how we can apply this theme as consistently. As a group of practitioner-scholars trying to keep ourselves from becoming alien and arrogantly irrelevant to scholar-practitioners, we must ask ourselves several questions generated by the authors. Do we as a field of scholars match the authors' level of concern for meeting the need that urban communities have for a more comprehensive level of services than evidence-based research can provide? Do we match the authors' zeal to include community members in the implementation and redirection of the intervention research projects? Are we willing to collaborate with diverse social welfare and medical health agencies to ensure families and children receive stable mental health care that can survive the other challenging realities of their lives? Dr. Atkins and his colleagues have provided a wonderful beginning to the development of models that broaden the role of community and school psychology as well as the role of intervention research in the schools. Unfortunately, this work is not easily supported by institutions of academic psychology where more control of extraneous variables, reduction of error, and increase of power is considered the hallmark of good research. Too often, community collaborative research is easier spoken than accomplished, and this commentary describes how valuable and how difficult the work of community collaboration is. The focus on teachers and parents is laudable and suggests how difficult it is to conduct interventions within schools without considering both of these constituencies. I appreciated the openness of the authors about the goals that were not reached and the reasons why. These admissions can be more meaningful than the quantitative results of evidence-based work. This work will make a wonderful contribution to the field of school-based mental health because it broadens the role of psychological intervention beyond the school context and into other relevant institutions in the lives of poor Black families. Furthermore, truly enlightening was the authors' hint at the cultural mismatch between clinical research staff and community participants. The use of community consultants represents an acknowledgement on the part of the researchers that the not-so-positive history of the community's experience with research and helping institutions is important and must not be ignored. The further integration of the community consultants, as not just guides into the communities but as eventual group facilitators, suggests that there was agreement on the need to expand the role of community consultants. Given the authors' efforts at expanding accessibility, effectiveness, and sustainability of mental health services, my primary feedback about the article will rest primarily on contributing to this expansion by suggesting one more element--visibility of the unpredictable relational elements that arises when researchers collaborate with Black folk. As such, I propose three suggestions toward making the inconspicuous culture of community participants visible. The first step is to acknowledge the unpredictability of conducting research in urban communities. The second is to acknowledge the cultural relational clashes and connections that occur between and among community participants and researchers. The third and final recommendation is to appreciate the benefits when researchers successfully persuade key informants to behave in different but increasingly successful ways. Predicting Unpredictability When the laboratory experiment does not go according to plan, the primary investigator can lose two or three years for every grant year that goes awry. However, with research focused on developing new models for children's mental health, unpredictability can be a meaningful theoretical and procedural process. …

Volunteer environmental monitoring and the role of the universities: the case of Citizens' Environment Watch.

Universities can provide a stable home for launching collaborative community research projects. Citizens' Environment Watch (CEW), an environmental monitoring initiative based at the University of Toronto, has made significant contributions to environmental education and stewardship in Ontario, Canada. Following dramatic cuts in provincial monitoring programs, citizens and youth have used chemical parameters and biological indicators to gauge water and air quality, and to identify areas requiring remediation and pollution prevention efforts. The relationship of Citizens' Environment Watch to government agencies, funders and other grassroots environmental groups has evolved over the past 5 years as CEW attempts to remain effective without taking on the investigative and enforcement roles to support the regulatory enforcement that has been largely abandoned by government. We explore the challenges inherent in developing and maintaining a volunteer organization that carries out rigorous and useful scientific work and we outline the ability of a university to help overcome these critical challenges. Finally, we present lessons learned for the benefit of other citizen and youth monitoring projects.

Commentary: Participatory Action Research Leads to Sustainable School and Community Improvement

Fantuzzo, McWayne, and Bulotsky (2003) describe a collaborative community research program that aims to decrease the population incidence of child maltreatment and build preschool children's competencies. This university-community collaborative has contributed substantially to the knowledge base that informs maltreatment prevention, including the development of a culturally appropriate measure of urban children's social competence, a better understanding of the deleterious effect of maltreatment on children's social and academic competencies, and the implementation and evaluation of a collaboratively developed intervention for maltreated children. Additionally, Fantuzzo and his colleagues have demonstrated their commitment to collaborate with community residents, practitioners, and agencies to apply research-based conceptualizations and empirical findings to building a community's capacity to protect its most vulnerable children. This collaborative community research program is an exemplar of the successful integration of two prevention research traditions: the investigator-driven research model (Cole et al., 1993; Weissberg & Greenberg, 1998) and the participatory action research model (Connell, Aber, & Walker, 1995; Knapp, 1995; May et al., 2002). In this commentary, I first compare the goals, assumptions, methods, benefits, and limitations of each approach to school and community prevention research (see Table 1). Next, I argue that the integration of traditional director-driven prevention research methods and participatory action research methods, as illustrated in the Fantuzzo et al. (2003) article, is essential to the goal of sustained and effective community prevention efforts. Investigator Driven Prevention Research (IDPR) Goals. The primary goal of IDPR, referred to by Fantuzzo et al. (2003) as the standard modus operandi is to identify efficacious prevention interventions. IDPR draws on data-driven theoretical conceptualizations of a problem (e.g., violence, substance abuse, child maltreatment) to develop and test interventions that target processes (e.g., child skills, classroom climate, or parent-child interactions) that are presumed to play a causal role in the development and/or maintenance of the problem. Prevention scientists are interested in testing the underlying theoretical conceptualization of the development of the problem as well as the efficacy of the intervention, in the hope of discovering principles of growth and change that can be applied broadly, across differing contexts. Given this goal of generalizing findings to new settings, replication of positive intervention effects is considered essential to the demonstration of an intervention's efficacy. Assumptions. IDPR assumes that the systematic process of developing interventions and the use of rigorous controls (especially randomized clinical trials) for factors other than the intervention that might account for changes on outcomes of interest produces knowledge that has broad applicability. Because prevention science researchers recognize that a program's efficacy will differ in different contexts, the long-term prevention research agenda incorporates the identification of contextual features that account for such differences in efficacy. IDPR also assumes that the researcher is the expert and that objectivity is essential to the discovery of generalizable truths. The quest for objectivity means that individuals responsible for implementing an intervention are often kept blind to the true goals of the intervention and to participants' assignments to different intervention conditions. Finally, LDPR assumes that following this Research and Development (R&D) stage, programs of demonstrated efficacy will be disseminated to and adopted by local communities. Methods. Because most prevention researchers are familiar with Fantuzzo et al.'s (2003) description of LDPR, repetition is not required here. …

"Where Does the Damp Come from?" Investigations into the Indoor Environment and Respiratory Health in Boston Public Housing

The self-reported prevalence of asthma increased by 75% from 1980 to 1994, a trend found to be significant and evident in every region of the country. The increase has been most marked in children 0-14 years of age, and there is evidence that, as with lead poisoning, inner-city and urban populations are most at risk. Attention has turned to the role of indoor environment risk factors, especially in homes and schools. Such factors include moisture and mold growth, pest infestation, dust mites, the building envelope, heating systems, inadequate ventilation, NO2, and environmental tobacco smoke. The Healthy Public Housing Initiative (HPHI) is a Boston-based community-centered research and intervention project designed to engage Boston Housing Authority residents in a collaborative process to improve respiratory health, quality of life, building conditions, and building maintenance in public housing. This article summarizes the significant research findings from four pilot studies in housing developments that lay the foundation for the larger HPHI asthma-related environmental intervention study. The research design for the pilot projects is informed by principles of community-collaborative research. The strengths of this model of research to our work are also discussed.

Estimating vulnerability under global change: modular modelling of pests

Global change research and decision-making are conducted in an environment where there are many stakeholders, numerous targets and few resources. This calls for global collaboration and sharing of information on a scale that has not been attempted before. It demands a parsimonious approach to research, with the aim of enabling robust decisions to be made with the minimum of new information. Our approach to these problems has been to develop generic analytical tools, which in turn are used to foster collaboration through joint model development, testing and application. This collaboration is achieved through a workshop and networking process to establish ‘ CLIMEX’- or ‘ DYMEX’- Modelling Networks, and to extend the information to the wider community using the world wide web (WWW) (http://www.ento.csiro.au/research/pestmgmt/IPMModellingNetwork/index.htm). In this paper we outline key features of these modelling approaches and illustrate a ‘hypothesis-driven’ approach to climate-matching, using CLIMEX (http://www.ento.csiro.au/research/pestmgmt/climex/climex.htm) that contrasts with the usual, statistically based, pattern-matching of meteorological data without consideration of possible mechanisms that limit the geographical distribution. We illustrate the nature of a generic and modular simulation model built using DYMEX (http://www.ento.csiro.au/research/pestmgmt/dymex/dymexfr.htm), but emphasize the urgency for the scientific community to collect the data necessary to build reliable population models. We summarize results and conclusions from a global change workshop based on the use of both these software tools. They illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach as a means of building collaborative international research communities, which are able to avoid repetition by contributing their modules into a library of functions for sharing with other users.