Establishing and sustaining community–university partnerships: A case study of quality of life research

Abstract

Community is a key construct in population health research and a major locus of health determinants study. In recent years in Canada, a new emphasis on such research has emerged in the form of community–university partnerships, supported by several of the major research granting agencies. The authors regard such partnerships as a special case of participatory action research (PAR), albeit one where greater emphasis is placed on the institutional nature of the university research partner. Drawing from the first three years’ experience of a local quality of life study, and the extant North American literature on community–university partnerships, this article explores how such partnerships are established and sustained. These processes are illustrated with critical reflections on some of the methods, actions and relational issues that arose during the authors’ quality of life project. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the potential benefits and costs of the growing Canadian trend to require such partnerships as a condition for research grants.

Keywords:

• Community-university partnerships
• participatory action research
• quality of life research
• population health

Acknowledgements

Two anonymous reviewers are thanked for helpful comments. Funding for the quality of life study and the Community–University Institute of Social Research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (#833-1999-1054). Williams, Labonte and Muhajarine were supported by salary awards from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit, in which Williams, Labonte and Muhajarine were located at the time of the research reported in this article, was further supported by funding from the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation. Randall was academic co-lead of the Community–University Institute of Social Research and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Saskatchewan.

Notes

Notes

1. We recognize that not all community–university partnerships will adopt such a model. Some will be confined to participatory research, where the commitments of the partners to new future actions is not explicitly made or fulfilled. In our own case, moving from a ‘participatory’ to a ‘participatory action’ model was problematic given our initial assumptions that the ‘action’ would automatically arise from community partners ‘empowered’ by the new research knowledge they helped to create.

2. There is a certain irony in this dichotomy, since the researchers involved in this case also lived in the neighbourhoods where the quality of life was being studied. One of them was actually called by our surveyors.

3. The term used to describe the majority of Canada's indigenous peoples.

4. We distinguish between ownership of results, and ownership of raw data. Researchers are bound by strict ethics rules to protect the confidentiality of individuals that might be revealed by examination of the raw data. Unless community partners wishing access to the raw data were similarly bound, the consent given by survey respondents, interviewees or focus-group participants would be violated. We note this as an emerging issue in community–university research partnerships.