Challenges in Sustaining Community-Based Participatory Research Partnerships

Undergraduate #311
Discipline: Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
Subcategory: Social Sciences/Psychology/Economics

Bria Carmichael - Xavier University of Louisiana
Co-Author(s): Giselle Corbie-Smith, Gaurav Dave, and Sable Watson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

---

In order to address the social determinants of health, researchers, public health practitioners, and community members have turned to more comprehensive and participatory approaches to implement research and interventions and one such approach is community-based participatory research (CBPR) in public health. Communitybased participatory research (CBPR) is an applied collaborative approach that enables community residents to more actively participate in the full spectrum of research with a goal of influencing change in community health, systems, programs or policies. Community members and researchers partner to combine knowledge and action for social change to improve community health and often reduce health disparities. More times than not the community members benefit from the interventions developed from CBPR are often focused on more than the actual partners and committees who implement the research and interventions themselves, hence issues related to the long- term sustainability of partnerships have received limited attention. A literature review was designed based on data that focused on the strengthening and sustaining of CBPR partnerships. Such data was extracted from three articles all which were researched through PubMed databases. As a whole, all articles were of common ground that open ended and direct discourse, a clear process upfront about project direction, finances, expectations, and other elements are necessary, but not always satisfactory to address the fundamental challenges in CBPR, and that there are likely to be differences in perspectives in such partnerships that require honest negotiation throughout the process of the project.

Funder Acknowledgement(s): Project IMHOTEP of Morehouse College

Faculty Advisor: Gaurav Dave, N/A