Expected Project Outcomes and Partnership Characteristics
The CBCRP funds community/academic collaborations in order to close the gap between what researchers study and what communities are concerned about. This is especially important in California, where little is known about breast cancer’s impact on the state’s diverse communities. The CBCRP also sees the potential to increase dissemination and application of research results, because community members involved in research studies will be more likely to ensure broad dissemination and use of the results.
The CBCRP CRC awards are based on a research process called community-based participatory research. Community-based participatory research requires the collaboration of an identified community with an academic or trained researcher to answer questions of interest to the community, for the purposes of informing the community, taking some action, or creating some change.
While historically there has been little research evaluating the outcomes of communitybased participatory research, many have described its benefits. For example, according to the National Institutes for Health (NIH), community-based participatory research has advantages that include:
- More effectively focusing the research questions on health issues of greatest relevance to the communities at highest risk;
- Enhancing recruitment and retention efforts by increasing community buy-in and trust;
- Enhancing the reliability and validity of measurement instruments (particularly surveys) through in-depth and honest feedback during pre-testing;
- Improving data collection through increased response rates and decreased social desirability response patterns;
- Increasing relevance of intervention approaches and thus likelihood for success;
- Targeting interventions to the identified needs of community members;
- Developing intervention strategies that incorporate community norms and values into scientifically valid approaches;
- Increasing accurate and culturally sensitive interpretation of findings;
- Facilitating more effective dissemination of research findings to impact public health and policy;
- Increasing the potential for translation of evidence-based research into sustainable community change that can be disseminated more broadly.
Three Partnership Characteristics are considered especially important in communitybased participatory research:
- Full collaboration and power sharing among partners are hallmarks of communitybased participatory research. Full involvement of the community at each stage of the research process ensures that the research is relevant to and used by the communities most impacted (Fadem et al., 2003; Israel, Schulz, Parker, & Becker, 1998).
- Healthy group dynamics can lead to a positive working experience. This supports effectively minimizing (or successfully coping with) community organization staff or research team turnover, budget crises, and other instability that could negatively impact the partners’ ability to collaborate fully and effectively on conducting the research (Goldstein, Freedman, Richards, & Grinstead, 2000; Maselli, Lys, & Schmid, 2004). Participants must also have the skills to engage in thoughtful self-awareness and self-critique, especially given the inherent power differences between most community members and their academically-trained partners (Marincowitz, 2003). Therefore, collaborative research requires an analysis and awareness of the power and authority of all partners. These power analyses should consider the partners’ relative positions in society, knowledge of research methods, and access to research participants (Hagey, 1997).
- Broader community involvement includes involvement from grassroots community members and various levels of the sponsoring community-based organization, especially senior management, line staff, and the board of directors. Greater community organization involvement can ensure that a broader level of organizational support will be achieved. More comprehensive organizational support can lead to a greater commitment of organizational resources and effort, as well as more successful management of any turnover. Participation of community members from outside of the organization’s staff can ensure that the project is representative of the community, not just of the few individuals included on the research team (Cornwall & Jewkes, 1995; Hatch, Moss, Saran, Presley-Cantrell, & Mallory, 1993; Lantz, Viruell-Fuentes, Israel, Softley, & Guzman, 2001).
Evaluation Questions
This evaluation report considers the following three questions:
- What were the breadth and strength of the outcomes of the CRC awards?
- Have the CRC projects been implemented according to the principles of community-based participatory research?
- What is the relationship between characteristics of the research partnerships and the outcomes of the research conducted by those partnerships?
