Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A health disparities study is co-led by a university and a community-based organisation with shared budget control.
- Is an instance
A CBPR project trains community members as research staff, ensuring local capacity outlives the grant.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Calling a study 'community-based' when researchers controlled all study decisions.
- Not an instance
CBPR framing with no shared budget, governance or authorship.
Editorial commentary
CBPR is most strongly developed in US public-health research and was formalised by Israel, Schulz, Parker and Becker’s nine principles (1998): recognises community as a unit of identity; builds on strengths and resources within the community; facilitates collaborative, equitable partnerships in all phases; fosters co-learning and capacity building; integrates knowledge and action for mutual benefit; promotes a co-learning and empowering process attentive to social inequalities; involves a cyclical and iterative process; addresses health from positive and ecological perspectives; disseminates findings and knowledge gained to all partners. CBPR shares conceptual ground with participatory action research and community-engaged research.
CBPR vs. participatory action research vs. community-engaged research
The three terms overlap and are sometimes used loosely, but a useful working distinction: participatory action research (PAR) is the broader methodological tradition (rooted in Lewin’s action research), emphasising cyclical inquiry-and-action regardless of setting; CBPR is the health-research-specific application of that same equitable-partnership logic, formalised through the nine principles above; and “community-engaged research” is a still-broader umbrella covering any research involving meaningful community input, which may or may not rise to CBPR’s specific standard of equitable, shared decision-making across all phases of the project (not just recruitment or dissemination). A study that consults a community advisory board on recruitment materials but retains all analytic and publication decisions with the research team is community-engaged, but not CBPR in the full sense of the term.
Governance mechanisms in practice
CBPR is typically operationalised through concrete governance instruments rather than as an informal orientation: a memorandum of understanding or partnership agreement setting out roles and shared decision-making; a community advisory board with real authority over protocol changes and dissemination, not merely an advisory function in name; co-authorship commitments; and, particularly where the research involves data about an identifiable community’s collective interests, a benefit-sharing agreement specifying how findings, resulting products, or any commercial value will be shared back with the community that contributed to the research.
References
- Israel BA et al. “Review of community-based research” Annual Review of Public Health 1998. Wallerstein N, Duran B “Community-Based Participatory Research for Health” 2018.
Related: Benefit-sharing agreement · FPIC · Traditional Knowledge (TK).
Also known as
CBPR · Community-engaged research · Participatory action research
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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