Engaging the Community: Community-Based Participatory Research and Team Science

This chapter describes the potential for incorporating community partner perspectives into contemporary team science by recounting contributions made by community-researcher partnerships characteristic of community-based participatory research (CBPR). These CBPR partnerships look similar to cross-disciplinary academic teams in their histories and imperatives to create shared leadership, mutual benefit, and multidirectional trust and respect. First, we define and then situate CBPR within the range of community-engaged research practices and discuss the opportunities as well as challenges for CBPR and community-engaged research (CEnR) to become established within Academic Health Science centers and clinical translational science award (CTSA) infrastructures. We will share summary results of CTSA surveys about community engagement, from the academic perspective and from community perspectives on barriers they continue to face. An in-depth example will be shared of a successful community-academic partnership that grew from a pilot study to a large-scale clinical and population intervention center. We will end with a CBPR conceptual model that showcases how cross-disciplinary teams are needed to describe the richness of contexts in which research take place, to frame the development and use of measures and metrics to evaluate partnerships, and to identify promising participatory practices associated with research and health outcomes. Recommendations are provided for engagement of community partners within the cross-disciplinary team science enterprise.