Community-Based Participatory Research: Empowering The Community

One of the most important components of community based research is ensuring that your research is being conducted in a way that is empowering the community and is relevant to the needs of the community. Ensuring that community based research is designed in an empowering way is especially important because often this type of research is conducted in vulnerable communities that have experienced various levels of discrimination. In Meredith Minker and Nina Wallerstein’s Community-Based Participatory Research for Health: From Process to Outcomes, there are several case studies, which include a plethora of best practices. For the purposes of this paper, I have chosen two case studies from the aforementioned book, which I feel best demonstrate how …show more content…
For example, the researchers let the girls pick the topic that they felt was most relevant to their community. The girls at the community had discussed the issues that they faced during their lives and they found that they had all faced instances of sexual harassment in their community. This was a powerful issue for the girls to address because they are all young girls, which is a group that is extremely likely to be victims of sexual harassment in their communities. By allowing, the girls to pick the topic that they wanted to research, the girls picked a topic that they feel passionate and invested in. Ensuring that the researchers employed the structure of empowering youth greatly contributed to the overall success of the study. Additionally, the staff were able to help aid the students by making sure that they aided the students in holding productive conversations and discussions on the topic.
Finally, this study has succeeded in “Developing structures for co-learning and capacity building” by making sure that this process included both mutual learning opportunities. This means that both the girls and the researchers were able to take things from this study. For example, the girls were able to gain leadership skills from the workshops that they led on sexual health and the researchers were able to gain a knowledge and understanding …show more content…
One of the reasons why I feel that this project was successful at this step was because of how they made sure to conduct interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic community mapping. By gathering data in a variety of different ways the researchers were able to gain access to a much more comprehensive way at looking at data. The interviews allowed the researchers to understand the outcomes that the community desired, while the ethnographic mapping allowed the researchers to understand the quantitative side of the problem.
Finally, this project was successful at “Developing structures for co-learning and capacity building”. The Transgender Community Health project, which was developed out of this community research project continues to actively meet and work with government and public stake holders. The project has been so successful that there are talks to expand the program into a nationwide initiative.
As an action researcher, I would apply the techniques that this group utilized to establish a system that empowers the group to build out and establish a system that is self sustaining. I feel that one of the major reasons why this project is able to be continued even a decade after the project has ended is because of how much power the community was given in this project from the beginning and were therefore able to continue it even after the project had