DOI: 10.1097/DBP.0b013e3181b0ef14

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PMID: 19672162

Issn Print: 0196-206X

Publication Date: 2009/08/01


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Community-Based Participatory Research: A Review of the Literature With Strategies for Community Engagement

Madeleine U. Shalowitz; Anthony Isacco; Nora Barquin; Elizabeth Clark-Kauffman; Patti Delger; Devon Nelson; Anthony Quinn; Kimberly A. Wagenaar

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Excerpt

Healthy People 2000 and 2010, the federal public health strategic plans, proposed to eliminate health disparities in populations grouped by social factors that negatively affect the health of mothers, infants, and children.1 In particular, infants and children from low-income and racial and ethnic minority families have higher rates of obesity and preterm birth, infant mortality (including sudden infant death syndrome), and morbidity and mortality because of asthma, when compared with infants and children from white or middle-income families.2–7 Despite a substantial investment by the federal government nearly more than 20 years of research and demonstration, aggregate statistics on children’s health in these areas show negligible improvement, indeed some problems have worsened.
In an effort to reconceptualize the approach to society’s most intractable health problems, community-based participatory research (CBPR) has emerged as a promising new direction. The CBPR is innovative because it harnesses community wisdom in an equal partnership with academic methodological rigor throughout the research process.8 The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in its comprehensive evidence report of CBPR, offered one well-stated definition of CBPR as “a collaborative research approach that is designed to ensure and establish structures for participation by communities affected by the issues being studied, representatives of organizations, and researchers in all aspects of the research process to improve health and well-being through taking action, including social change.”8 The purpose of this article is to review the CBPR literature and to provide a case example of the initial strategies that we used to engage community members in an academic-community partnership using CBPR as our guiding framework.
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