Public Engagement

There is sometimes concern among those who do community-based participatory research (CBPR) that it will be viewed as insufficiently evidence-based and rigorous by academic colleagues, and that efforts to help the community change will be seen to overstep the bounds of proper "objective" scholarship. I put these questions to Cathy Jordan, Director of the University of Minnesota's Children, Youth and Family Consortium, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, and one of our most effective practitioners of CBPR. Here are her responses, which strike me as quite convincing:

Although it is somewhat outside the usual definition, I see CBPR as one possible route to helping to establish evidence-based treatments, at least those that apply to community health problems. CBPR can be an effective, and possibly more effective, tool to study the efficacy of various community-based approaches to intervention around issues like smoking, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, etc. That research can establish the evidence-based treatments relevant to community health.

There is also no reason that CBPR could not utilize evidence-based treatments (traditional definition) in a research study. Just as the DREAMS Project used gold standard empirical prospective research methods and the Phillips Lead Project was essentially a clinical trial (and they were therefore rigorous) there is nothing to say that clinical research using evidence-based treatments could not be done in a CBPR approach. (The DREAMS Project and Phillips Lead Project were federally funded CBPR longitudinal studies, one on the developmental effects of lead and the other on the efffectiveness of a culture-specific peer education intervention.) I think you could even have wet lab research be part of a CBPR project.

CBPR doesn't dictate the methods. It speaks only to issues like co-creation of the agenda, co-design of the work, balance in decision-making power, use of the resulting information to make some community-defined impact, etc. If researchers working with a community group feel that such a research design would answer some question relevant to what the collaboration is trying to find out, they make that decision together and the community folks entrust the basic researcher to design the right study and help them understand it and make use of the resulting information, then the basic science project has a place in a CBPR project.

I have a real life example. I've been loosely part of a network of folks interested in the links between nutrition, brain biochemistry, health, and development. Various parts of the network have worked on various questions. There are folks doing collaborative research in Indian Country around nutrition and chemical dependency treatment. Others are interested in school breakfast and lunch changes and effects on school performance. There is a general understanding amongst the folks in the network that it is important to understand the brain piece and to base the interventions on an understanding of this basic science work. Therefore there is a basic science guy that does chemical dependency animal model work as part of this network.

Regarding the "help the community change" notion - faculty who do public health practice, for example, do this all the time. They aim to create improved community health outcomes through interventions and their evaluations, dissemination of evidence-based prevention information, etc. They may even use a "community-organizing approach" to do this but they would say that this can still be scholarship. They produce reports and practice recommendations, public education curricula, intervention protocols, training manuals, etc. If they submit these for peer review and they disseminate them to the audiences that are relevant for their purposes, should that not count as scholarship?