Current issueIs Community-Based Participatory Research Possible?
Section snippets
The Pillars of Community-Based Participatory Research
Notwithstanding the plethora of principles, CBPR rests on two main pillars. The first is ethical and responds to a history of exploitation of communities—especially minority and low-income communities—in the name of research. The most notorious U.S. example is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study,9 but the residents of many communities can recall university researchers who came to conduct interviews or take samples and then vanished.5 The academics presumably published, won grants, and were promoted,
The Challenges
Adherence to the complete CBPR model—equitable community participation in every phase of the research project—presents a number of serious challenges. The first is defining the community. It may be difficult to recruit a sufficient number of participants for a research project from a small geographically defined community. On the other hand, a large community that is not defined by geography (for instance, “the African-American community”) may be too diffuse to enter into a meaningful
Conclusion
Gaining a perfect or near-perfect score on the various sets of principles and criteria may be, if not impossible, certainly difficult. However, they represent targets or goals to pursue and their pursuit has had a salubrious effect on the way in which research is conducted in communities and on the research initiatives that are undertaken. With regard to the two pillars on which the CBPR approach rests, there are few hard data on the extent to which CBPR has led to community empowerment or
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