Building trust: Researchers come in as problem solvers
Help community with its priorities first
Building trust in a community can take a great deal of time and resources.
One method often used in community-based participatory research (CBPR) is to work first with the community to solve their existing concerns and problems.
"Our premise is as a university or organization we need to help people solve their problems before they'll be interested in participating in research," says Paul McGinnis, MPA, community health quality and practice development director at the Oregon Rural Practice-based Research Network of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR.
"It doesn't matter what they identify as an issue," he adds. "We have to go in and allow them to conduct assessments within the community with our help, pick the priority areas they want to address, and pick projects and programs that will help them move forward."
Researchers also can try a shortcut to trust building by working with another organization that already has a cache of community trust.
In McGinnis' CBPR project in Jefferson County, Oregon, researchers found that community members wanted to focus on five broad areas of interest, including care provided at the local hospital, affordable health insurance, mental health care, oral health, and health promotion related to physical activity and nutrition.1
The community decided to focus on childhood obesity as part of addressing these areas of interest.
"The community wanted to do a walking school bus with safe routes to school, and they wanted to use vouchers for an aquatics center to get kids more physically active," McGinnis says.
Another project the community envisioned involved building a walking path near the senior center.
"Those kinds of activities are not research, but these were the things the community wanted to make happen," he says.
"So we helped them collect the resources they needed to do these kinds of projects, including finding the right people," McGinnis says. "They also raised their own money for the projects."
The goal was for researchers to build trust in the community through collaboration on the non-research projects.
Then as soon as a research study becomes available, the investigators can rely on the existing infrastructure of trust in the community, McGinnis says.
"We have the opportunity to conduct a variety of different types of research from research that takes place with patients in a clinic to research involvement in public health and population surveillance," he explains. "These are the programs and projects that lend themselves to policy-based research and CBPR – it's action research."
Another strategy to conducting research within a community is to send third-year medical students to the community where they can work on research involving childhood obesity and translational research, McGinnis says.
Reference
- McGinnis PB, Hunsberger M, Davis M, et al. Transitioning from CHIP to CHIRP, blending community health development with community-based participatory research. Fam Community Health. 2010;33(3):228-237.
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