Big Ideas at Queens College

Isabel Cuervo is engaged in community-based participatory research to evaluate safety recommendations for cleaning products She works with domestic workers who are among those most affected by these issues.

The following is taken from: "Community-Based Participatory Research: A Strategy for Building Healthy Communities and Promoting Health Through Policy Change." (linked below)

Principles for Community-Based Participatory Research

Effective, authentic CBPR aspires to the following qualities:

1. Recognizes community as a unit of identity.

2. Builds on strengths and resources within the community.

3. Facilitates a collaborative, equitable partnership in all phases of research, involving an empowering and power-sharing process that attends to social inequalities.

4. Fosters co-learning and capacity building among all partners.

5. Integrates and achieves a balance between knowledge generation and intervention for the mutual benefit of all partners.

6. Focuses on the local relevance of public health problems and on ecological perspectives that attend to the multiple determinants of health.

7. Involves systems development using a cyclical and iterative process.

8. Disseminates results to all partners and involves them in the wider dissemination of results.

9. Involves a long-term process and commitment to sustainability.

10. Openly addresses issues of race, ethnicity, racism, and social class, and embodies “cultural humility.”

11. Works to ensure research rigor and validity but also seeks to ”broaden the bandwidth of validity” with respect to research relevance.

Databases

Participatory research can happen in many different disciplines, so it's probably worth checking subject specific databases to see what kinds of participatory research is happening in your area! Below are some suggestions:

Books

This guide was originally created by Nancy Foasberg.