Collaborations in community-engaged research: paving the way for the future of social work research

ABSTRACT

This special issue focusing on collaborations between community-engaged scholars and community practice partners, provides a nod to our history, a celebration of current innovative research, and a call to the future. The articles included here convey the richness and complexity of community-engaged research. The authors provide keen insights into the personal, political, and professional challenges that arise when engaging in this kind of research. Perhaps most importantly, this issue centers our attention on the deep knowledge and lived experiences of community members who have often been sidelined by academic researchers rather than being included as rightful partners in social work scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• community-engaged research
• collaborations
• participatory research
• community research
• anti-oppressive research
• anti-racist research

Overview of community-engaged research collaborations

There is no one, “correct” way of doing community-engaged research, a point brought home by this collection of articles. Rather, we can think of community-engaged research as arrayed on a continuum across these stages:

• No/little community involvement such that the research is investigator driven and information is extracted from community members.

• Community-placed research in which inquiry happens in a community and may be about a community, but community members have little determination regarding the focus or scope.

• Community-based research that deepens the level of involvement within the community; community members are not only sources of information, but they also help guide or inform the research.

• Community-based participatory research, which signifies amore equitable partnership between researchers and community members, with the purpose of data identification, gathering, and analysis, and use of findings shaped significantly by the community.

• Community-driven research that is firmly centered on the goals and needs of the community, with the researcher being “in service” to the community and the research clearly determined by the community.

Perhaps with the exception of the first example, community-engaged research requires some partnership or collaboration between the researcher (often university based) and the community. In the ideal, such collaborations are reciprocal, empowering, relational, and respectful. The articles in this special issue mostly reflect that latter end of this continuum that includes various forms of collaboration with the community.

Scholars committed to genuine community engagement know that considerable time and attention needs to be devoted to the development and maintenance of these partnerships. This is perhaps the most often cited challenge in doing community-engaged research – the time it takes to both build authentic relationships with community members and conduct the research. Several authors in this issue address this challenge, but it is worth emphasizing here that university culture is often a significant liability. The traditional metrics for hiring, tenure, and promotion typically do not include recognition of the time and the emotional work involved in authentic community engagement. Further, the “products” of community-engaged research may not be peer-reviewed journal articles, but instead (because this is more useful to the community) might be a photovoice installation or a series of infographics. Academic institutions will need to fundamentally reconsider what is meant by “impact” if community-engaged research is to flourish. In addition, the bureaucracy that university scholars must go through to establish agreements, payments and other processes with community partners and members is often laborious and time consuming, which can lead to community mistrust of the university and university scholars.

Social work can and should be a leader in the realignment of university culture. The profession is quick to mention the founding role of Jane Addams and her work with the Hull House Settlement. Yet Addams, along with Ellen Gates Starr, Julia Lathrop, and Florence Kelly, also undertook extensive community mapping projects to illustrate disease rates, economic indicators, schooling and truancy patterns, and other socio-economic constructs in Chicago (Font-Casaseca, 2022). Addams was trained in community mapping techniques by W.E.B. Du Bois (Morris, 2015), who we feature in the From the Archives article. While Du Bois and Addams would make significant contributions to the emerging field of community sociology and the importance of research for social activism, neither would be recognized for their groundbreaking, foundational work by the preeminent sociology department of the time, the University of Chicago (Deegan, 1988; Morris, 2015). Social work needs to reclaim this history, specifically the social justice imperative of community-engaged research. Our profession needs to celebrate, recognize, reward and challenge social work scholars to push boundaries, create change and pave the way for the advancement of community-engaged and collaborative scholarship on issues of impact and importance to the community.

From the archives: a nod to the past

We begin this special issue with Paul Stuart’s (2023) From the Archives article “The Philadelphia Negro: Community-University Research Collaboration in the 1890s.” Stuart argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’s empirical study of urban African Americans in the 1890s exemplifies pioneering community-university research collaboration. Stuart’s article provides excerpts from two historical documents from Du Bois’s study: The Preface (pp. iii-v) discusses sources of support for the project and Du Bois plans for future research on urban African Americans; and the Introduction (pp. vii-xv) to the study, written by Samuel McCune Lindsay, a member of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sociology Department.

Stuart discusses several issues that Du Bois faced in conducting his research that contemporary community-engaged scholars have also struggled with, including defining the community and the research problem, challenges in working through and with a university, partners that may not represent the community, community mistrust of researchers, and securing ongoing funding. Du Bois’ acknowledgment that both individual problems and the social environment contributed to the struggles of Philadelphia Negroes was not well received because it “did not fit with nineteenth century attitudes about the poor,” which focused on individual deficits and problems (Stuart). While social work research has made advances in understanding and recognizing community strengths, as well as systemic, social, and environmental causes of poverty, too often the focus is on individual problems and solutions. Stuart also discusses how the University of Pennsylvania, who sponsored Du Bois’ research and published his report, marginalized Du Bois, including not providing him with an office, resources, or connections with faculty and students. Stuart states that “no major white university employed African American faculty members in the 1890s.” Du Bois was not offered a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, but instead accepted one at Atlanta University where he continued his research. However, foundations funding similar projects by white researchers did not fund Du Bois’ Atlanta research.

Participatory action and anti-racist approaches to community-engaged research

This issue highlights the importance of deep community connections as part of the research process – from conceptualization to data analysis. The research presented also reminds us that identity matters considering who we are in the research process, how community partners are understood, how roles are defined, and the language we use to describe those roles. Power rests in positionality and, historically, PhD-educated scholars at “the helm” of research projects held and distributed power to benefit themselves and advance “their” scholarship. The authors published in this special issue challenge us to rethink these notions and present new paradigms of being for university-situated researchers, university systems that support research, and community-situated researchers.

Reconceptualizing power in the research process is at the heart of participatory action research methods and anti-oppressive and anti-racist research. In their article “For the Institution or For the Community? Toward an Anti-Oppressive Research Praxis in Conducting Participatory Action Research,” Gutierrez, Sonsteng-Person, King-Shaw, and Valmocena (2023) provide a conceptual framework to anchor key principles of conducting anti-oppressive research that challenges the dominant ideologies of neutrality and objectivity in research. An anti-oppressive research praxis jettisons the orthodox assumption that university-situated scholars approach research as an empty vessel objectively separated from their context, assumptions, and lived experiences. It also, as the authors argue, respects community members as agents of a study rather than objects of it. As Gutierrez et al. posit, part of this work is to challenge the very assumptions that historically benefit the institution over the community. They offer three anti-oppressive principles in research to ensure the community’s voice is centered and the community benefits from the research: (1) awareness of inherent power structures; (2) constantly working to disrupt power; and (3) transformative practice (Gutierrez et al.)

Considering the experiences of young people as experts in issues impacting their lives shifts the traditional approach to youth participation in research. In their article, “Youth participatory action research as an empowerment-based method for community change,” Wagaman and colleagues (2023) posit that youth participatory action research (YPAR) builds empowerment skills leading to increased capacity for change. They identify 5 components for youth empowerment: (1) belief in one’s own knowledge, expertise, and power; (2) ability to engage/activate one’s own knowledge, expertise, and power; (3) critical consciousness; (4) sense of connection to others and their experiences; and (5) being perceived as having worth, value, and making important contributions (Wagaman et al.). These considerations engage youth in the co-creation of knowledge, emphasizing the central claims of this special issue that community voices ought to be at the center of knowledge creation processes and, in so doing, research builds capacity to address seemingly intractable social problems.

Smith, Wilson, Fraser, Hanna, and Larsosa’s (2023) article “Anti-racist research practice Partnerships as Critical Education: Dismantling the Master’s House with Their Own Tools,” focuses specifically on building an anti-racist research practice partnership and leverages Critical Race Theory similarly to Gutierrez et al. Smith and colleagues engage us in critical thought about collaborative, co-productive, self-reflective inquiry by centering the voices of Black children. Their work also moves us beyond current epistemologies into an Afro-futurist space that centers the leadership of Black women and critical care for Black communities. The important implication of this research is that, as several other authors in this special edition argue, community-engaged research requires a transformation and reorientation of university systems of power, control, and ownership. Mutual collaborations can only exist in community-engaged research within relationships of trust and accountability.

Community-engaged research has the potential to empower individuals, families, communities, and organizations through building capacity to answer questions most important to communities themselves. Huguley et al.’s (2023) findings in “From Research-to-Practice-to-Research: Leveraging Reciprocal Partnerships to Advance Racial and Educational Justice Across Ecological Levels,” demonstrate this through unpacking, in partnership with community members, strategies African American families use to disrupt systems of power and oppression to ensure equitable access to educational institutions. Similar to other articles in this section, Huguley and colleagues detail the role of community-engaged research as an iterative process that leads to community change and transformation. Their research also highlights the often-racialized differences in outcomes among populations, particularly in under-resourced communities.

An article by Gutiérrez (2023), “Latinas/os Remaking home through community-engaged mapping,” presents an ethnographic and qualitative exploration of community sentiments and spatial perceptions in light of community changes in South Phoenix. Gutiérrez provides a contemporary illustration of how collaborative and participatory research methods were used for a community mapping exercise to help residents explore their feelings about community, home, and identity. This process led to a more holistic understanding of the impact of urban development on residents’ identity and sense of place, including how South Phoenix was deliberately excluded from the progress in the wealthier parts of Phoenix.

Learning from interdisciplinary and institutional collaboration

Social Work researchers must also learn how to establish collaborations across disciplines and within their own universities in order to advance impactful community-engaged research. The two manuscripts described below focus on the characteristics and relational processes necessary to advance partnerships and collaboration among disciplines and partners within academic structures, and ways in which strengthening these collaborations also strengthens collaborations with the community itself.

Rebecca Lobb and colleagues’ (2023) article, “Using the Collective Impact Framework to create a shared vision for community-engaged research,” describes how an interdisciplinary partnership was developed to address public mistrust of the medical community during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors describe the development of a longitudinal and authentic partnership among medical researchers, practitioners, and the community to work alongside one another to address the mistrust due to racial and social inequities in infection rates and misinformation. This manuscript describes how two isolated initiatives collaborated with one another and the community during the pandemic to advance community-engaged research focused on health equity. The authors discuss how they analyzed six essential conditions for collective impact to improve the impact of their collaboration.

Moonhawk Kim and colleagues’ (2023) article “A third partner in the research-practice partnership: The Need for Intra-University Collaboration to Enable Ethical Community-Engaged Scholarship across Institutional Boundaries,” describes collaboration within partners in the university: social work researchers and the administrative staff supporting the Institutional Review Board (IRB). The authors discuss how the same factors that influence inter-partner collaboration also influence intra-partner collaboration: trust and relationship, boundary spanning, and contextual condition. This paper provides important lessons regarding ways in which community-engaged scholars can make needed institutional changes at their university to advance collaboration with community partners.

International perspectives on collaboration

Three articles in this special issue provide an international perspective on collaboration in community-engaged research. The articles share a few commonalities. One issue that comes up in these internationally themed studies is the perceived struggle for research legitimacy when the partnership and methods are deeply community engaged. Relatedly, the authors in these three articles take advantage of the full toolbox of research and evaluation methods to match community needs with research design. Another commonality in the three articles is the recognition that their community-engaged research is intended for a broader audience than the typical academic audience utilizing peer reviewed-research – and by targeting a broader audience the community-engaged research partnership can be a source of community power.

Fisher, Sangadji, and Njoki Mwangi (2023) provide the article “Using bottom-up evaluation to build community practice-based evidence and strengthen community-engaged research.” In this article, the authors use a “bottom-up evaluation” (BUE) approach to generate innovative practice strategies where there is unmet community need. The authors use an example of a community generated intervention in Kenya for HIV positive single mothers to demonstrate how community-engaged evaluation can be used to generate practice approaches. The study describes three phases of BUE used with this community in Kenya.

A second article, “Learning together about disasters through action research partnerships,” by Rawsthorne et al. (2023) provides two case studies of collaborations between interdisciplinary teams and communities that have experienced climate related disasters in Australia. The authors make special note of the richness of learning when community members’ knowledge and experiences are centered. The authors note that conducting research while walking alongside their community partners challenges many traditional research assumptions. The authors conclude that by conducting research that walks alongside community partners the findings succeed in: (1) shifting power to community; and (2) disseminating knowledge to broader stakeholder groups including community members.

A third article by Kaloga (2023), “Research collaborations for systems transformation action research,” addresses the role of researchers in extractive relationships with community members. The author critiques this approach and suggests that researchers need to work intentionally and proactively to build authentic community relationships. The author highlights a framework developed by STARlab (System Transformation Action Research Lab) to combat an extractive research approach. The article focuses on two research relationships in New Zealand as case examples of their collaboration model focused on inclusive entrepreneurship. The model illustrates four key elements for how researchers can effectively partner with the community to facilitate action research for systems transformation and social change.

Challenges in community-engaged research: advancing promising solutions

Three articles in the special issue center their contributions on the challenges of community-engaged research. First, an article by Littman et al. (2023), “Navigating, subverting, and replacing conventional academic structures and expectations to co-create with participatory action research (PAR) teams: where to for PAR scholarship?,” looks at the structural constraints of participatory action research in academic research. The authors use autoethnography of their own PAR work and identify numerous challenges of doing PAR in the academy, including (1) questioning legitimacy and rigor, (2) time needed to do the work, (3) challenges funding the work adequately and ethically, and (4) ableism embedded within tenure structures. The authors use case examples to illustrate their results and offer recommendations for social work academics: (1) elevate PAR training and reward systems to recognize PAR as legitimate knowledge development; (2) build support systems for conducting PAR in the academy; (3) revise evaluation of scholars at milestones to value PAR; (4) align funding opportunities and practices with PAR (Littman, et al.)

A second article by Shook et al. (2023), “Using research to build power: the Pittsburgh wage study,” challenges the use of typical measures of academic success such as number of journal articles written, or grants received. The authors suggest that too much of the work in academia is describing problems rather than listening to the solutions offered by community members. The authors argue that community groups gain power when researchers follow the community’s lead in centering community identified research questions and research methods. A framework is discussed for how social workers can use rigorous engaged research to build power in collaborative research, including: (1) build relationships by showing up, (2) center the questions partners want answered, (3) use multiple forms of dissemination, and (4) engage in politics (Shook, et al.).

The third article in this section, “Understanding memorandums of understanding: lessons learned through the negotiation of contracts in research practice partnerships,” by Shapiro, Metzger, Jones, and Duane (2023) delves into the memorandum of understanding (MOU) process in community-engaged work and analyzes aspects of the MOU process that can promote community-engaged relationships. This article focuses on lessons learned in creating MOUs for collaboration agreements and offers an “orientation” to this complex process. The authors suggest that developing high quality MOUs can result in more impactful community-engaged research.

Discussion and reflections

This Special issue reflects how far community-engaged research has evolved since the pioneering work of Du Bois and Addams. Collectively, the authors capture the scope of topics, methodologies, inclusion strategies, and dissemination options. They also demonstrate that research rigor is neither limited to clinical settings nor dependent on positivist frameworks to generate critically important knowledge that can inform social work practice.

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, this progress, there is still work to be done in terms of supporting community-engaged research and researchers. Specifically:

• The research partnerships in this issue demonstrate how community stakeholders can work together but systematic changes are needed within universities to remove barriers (i.e., IRB protocols, tenure and promotion processes, impact metrics) that are not conducive to working with partners outside of the academy. We are not suggesting that universities reduce the rigor expected of research or weaken ethical oversight. We are asserting that the needed time and flexibility intrinsic to community-engaged research be recognized and factored into any review process of faculty, which would necessitate alternative IRB review paths, a reconsideration of publication count, and the inclusion of alternative impact products. If universities wish to support community-engaged research, then institutional structures and processes need to reflect that this approach differs from more traditional models of knowledge production.

• Social work scholars need to continue to refine community-engaged research methodologies and processes. Community engagement is central to community practice but growing the research base with examples of how these partnerships balance research rigor with the relational aspects is critical to making a collective impact. Further, community-engaged researchers need to be open to learning new approaches, such as that being generated by indigenous scholars. Community-engaged research now extends far beyond the usual ethnographic, observational, and interview paradigms to include visual arts, storytelling, and area mapping in ways that are co-produced with community members.

• Community-engaged research partnerships can be used as opportunities to disrupt the systematic barriers that support oppressive traditions in traditional social work research. Instead of using research protocols that promote distrust in communities by approaching them as laboratories and not contributing to long-term community capacity to create solutions, social work researchers must work with stakeholders to create structures that allow for co-leadership and co-learning models in which power and influence are not centered with the university representatives.

• Instead of ignoring or diminishing the lived experiences communities have faced with racism, discrimination, and socioeconomic inequality, community-engaged scholars can and should work with them to incorporate this lens for understanding and identifying issues or problems that will be addressed. These issues are often embedded into the work but should be more explicit, as appropriate, to accurately reflect the community dynamics and cultural context. Doing so requires a level of cultural awareness and humility by the researcher, who needs to be open to how their privilege (whether cultural or institutional) might skew the research to their, and not the community’s interest.

The issues associated with Du Bois’ research raised by Stuart’s in his article “From the Archives,” are in many ways still relevant today. These issues and themes permeate the articles included in this Special issue and can be used as a call for the action needed to elevate and advance the field of community-engaged research in social work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).