Community-Based Participatory Research

Historical Roots

CBPR traces its roots in part to the action research tradition of Kurt Lewin, Davydd Greenwood and William Foote Whyte and others in the 1940s and beyond. But it also finds parentage in the liberatory philosophy and methods of the Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire and other scholar-activists of the 1970s and 1980s from Africa, Asia and Latin America, who emphasized action based on critical reflection and commitment to social transformation as a key component of participatory research. Finally, CBPR also owes a debt to feminism and feminist action research traditions, with their focus on the personal as political and the importance of women's voices in and ownership of research.

As Lawrence Green and Shawna Mercer have suggested, CBPR effects a change in the balance of power where research ‘objects' become research subjects, offering not only their consent but also their knowledge and experience to the formulation of the research question and to many other aspects of the research process. It is to this orientation to research, with its accent on issues of trust, power, dialogue, community capacity building and collaborative inquiry, towards the goal of social change, that CBPR ideally is committed.

CBPR has evolved in many directions and occurs along a continuum. Applications of CBPR range from the use of community advisory boards (CABs) to help with sample recruitment, interpretation of findings and other specific tasks to the more emancipatory end of the continuum, with its accent on community engagement throughout the process. Increasingly, efforts are being made in both government-funded university partnerships and grass-roots, community-led partnerships to live up to the ‘gold standard’ of CBPR, with genuine, high-level community engagement throughout the process.

Principles of CBPR

Although many CBPR partnerships develop their own principles and tenets of engagement, the set of principles developed by Israel and her community and academic partners is among the most commonly used. Briefly, they suggest that CBPR

• recognizes the community as a unit of identity, whether the community is defined in geographic, racial, ethnic or other terms;
• builds on strengths and resources within the community;
• facilitates a collaborative, equitable partnership in all phases of research, involving an empowering and power-sharing process that attends to social inequalities;
• fosters co-learning and capacity building among partners;
• achieves a balance between knowledge generation and intervention for the benefit of all partners;
• focuses on the local relevance of public health problems and on ecological perspectives that attend to the multiple determinants of health;
• involves systems development using a cyclical and iterative process;
• disseminates results to the partners and involves them in the wider dissemination of results; and
• involves a long-term process and commitment to sustainability.

[Page 153]However, Meredith Minkler and Nina Wallerstein argue that CBPR principles should also explicitly include attention to gender, race, class and culture, as these interlock and influence every aspect of the research enterprise. They add to this list a point on ‘cultural humility’. Developed by Melanie Tervalon and Jane Garcia, the concept of cultural humility suggests that while researchers cannot ever be ‘competent’ in another's culture, they can demonstrate openness to learning about others' cultures while examining their own biases.

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