CBPR in Indian Country: Tensions and Implications for Health Communication

Abstract

There is a common perspective among public health researchers and community members that although health promotion or disease prevention practices, programs, and projects should be done with rather than to individuals and communities, for various practical, economic, political, and cultural reasons, this is easier said than done. This study examines community-based participatory research (CBPR) in a university-based research center conducting health promotion and disease prevention research in Indian Country. This article reviews the tensions between CBPR ideologies, its practical application in Indian Country, and the impact of this theory/practice dialectic on the ability to conduct health promotion and disease prevention research. It concludes that far from empowering individuals and communities, status quo research in Indian Country perpetuates a type of “clientism” that reinforces researcher/researched relationships.

Notes

¹In the present article, interviewees are identified as either researchers with the designation “R” or community members (CM). Thus, R12 is the 12th researcher interviewed for the project.

²See discussion in Minkler and Wallerstein (2003) of community-based rather than community-placed research.

³“The instrumental model of interdisciplinarity is concerned with practical problem solving by applying specially produced knowledge to technical problems or to policy issues” (Heydebrand, 1990, p. 291).

⁴“Native American” is often used interchangeably with the currently preferred term American Indian. Native American is a broader term that includes all the indigenous peoples of North, South, and Central America (e.g. Inuit, native Hawaiians, Mayans, etc.).

⁵The term “projects” tended to be used by interviewees to refer to funded research activities with specific time frames. “Programs,” on the other hand, tended to refer to activities with communities that evolved over long periods of time, often over many funded projects. Another distinction was that the term “program” tended to be used to downplay the “research” aspect of activities while emphasizing the delivery of services.

⁶One group was made up of only junior research staff, and the other consisted only of community members.

⁷This is in reference to the controversy around the assertion among some American Indians that the celebration of Thanksgiving is a bitter reminder of hundreds of years of betrayal returned for friendship.