The use of community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been promoted in the past decade as a viable approach to create sustainable social change in community settings. However, partnerships between academic and community organizations continue to struggle with knowledge, resources, climate, and leadership that generate equitable ownership and mastery with CBPR processes and products. Although the need for community readiness to participate in health promoting interventions has been reported, the use of a dyadic lens to assess and leverage each partner's (i.e., community and academic) unique intra-organizational readiness and the synergistic partnership dyad's readiness to conduct CBPR has not been systematically investigated. With a lack of readiness to engage and conduct CBPR among either partner or the dyad, the potential products of partnerships are vulnerable. The broad, long-term objectives of this research are to optimize CBPR processes and products by understanding and leveraging CBPR readiness of academic and community partners and the partnership dyad. With extensive experiences with partner collaboration and CBPR, the investigators propose to: (1) explore and define the dimensions and key indicators necessary for readiness to engage in CBPR from the both the partner (i.e., academic and community) and partnership dyad perspectives using qualitative methods (key informant interviews and focus groups);(2) develop and pretest an instrument, Partnership Readiness for CBPR (PR-CBPR), that will assess partner and the partnership dyad readiness to conduct CBPR;and, 3) formulate core objectives and curriculum strategies to conduct a training program designed to leverage readiness to conduct CBPR for partnership dyads. The partners in this application are the Charleston Trident Urban League (CTUL) and the College of Nursing at the Medical University of South Carolina (CON-MUSC). This project is guided by the principles of CBPR and readiness dimensions adapted from the community readiness theory. The findings of this study will advance the scientific knowledge of CPBR readiness from both the partner and partnership dyad perspectives. This knowledge will be useful in leveraging readiness to conduct CBPR and to optimize partnership outcomes, with the goal of creating sustainable social change in marginalized community settings. The use of community based participatory research (CBPR) has been promoted as a viable approach to create sustainable change in community settings. However, partnerships between community and academic organizations continue to struggle with knowledge, capacity, skills, and climate that generate equitable ownership and mastery with CBPR processes. A contextual understanding of partner (academic and community) and the partnership readiness to conduct CBPR is needed to optimize sustainable community outcomes.
| Andrews, Jeannette O; Newman, Susan D; Meadows, Otha et al. (2012) Partnership readiness for community-based participatory research. Health Educ Res 27:555-71 |
| Andrews, Jeannette O; Cox, Melissa J; Newman, Susan D et al. (2011) Development and evaluation of a toolkit to assess partnership readiness for community-based participatory research. Prog Community Health Partnersh 5:183-8 |
