Promoting community and population health in public health and medicine: A stepwise guide to initiating and conducting community-engaged research

INTRODUCTION Various methods, approaches, and strategies designed to understand and reduce health disparities, increase health equity, and promote community and population health have emerged within public health and medicine. One such approach is community-engaged research (Clinical and Translational Science Awards [CTSAs] Consortium Community Engagement Key Function Committee Task Force on the Principles of Community Engagement, 2011; Committee to Review the CTSAs Program at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Institute of Medicine, 2013; Rhodes, 2014; Trinh-Shevrin, Islam, Nadkarni, Park, & Kwon, 2015; Wolfson et al., 2017). Simply defined, community-engaged research is an approach to research designed to improve health through the involvement of the impacted community in research, where the community refers to any group of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations. Rather than researchers from universities, government, or other types of research organizations approaching and entering a community with a preconceived notion of what is best for a community, community-engaged research involves community members and representatives from community organizations collaborating and sharing research roles with academic researchers. Community-engaged research moves from treating community members as targets of research to engaging them as research partners. Community-engaged research emphasizes collaboration and co-learning; reciprocal transfer of expertise; sharing of decision-making power; and shared ownership of the processes and products of research (CTSAs Consortium Community Engagement Key Function Committee Task Force on the Principles of Community Engagement, 2011; Committee to Review the CTSAs Program at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Institute of Medicine, 2013; Israel, Schulz, Parker, & Becker, 1998; Rhodes, 2014; Trinh-Shevrin et al., 2015). Community-engaged research is viewed as an approach to reduce the “17-year gap”, which suggests that it takes 17 years for 14 percent of original research to benefit patient care (Balas et al., 2000), because among its strengths, community-engaged research builds bridges among community members, those who serve communities through service delivery and practice, and academic researchers. Incorporating the experiences of community members, who are experts in their lived experiences and their community’s needs, priorities, and assets, and of representatives from community organizations with sound science can promote the reduction of health disparities and achieve health equity through deeper and more informed understandings of health-related phenomena and the identification of actions (e.g., interventions, programs, policies, and system changes) that are more relevant; culturally congruent; and likely to be effective, sustained, and scalable, if warranted (CTSAs Consortium Community Engagement Key Function Committee Task Force on the Principles of Community Engagement, 2011; Committee to Review the CTSAs Program at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Institute of Medicine, 2013; Kost et al., 2016; Rhodes, Mann-Jackson, et al., 2017). Similarly, study designs, including those used to evaluate actions, that are informed by multiple perspectives may be more authentic to the community and to the ways that community members convene, interact, and take action. Thus, interventions, for example, may be more innovative; recruitment benchmarks, including enrollment and retention rates, may be higher; measurement may be more precise; data collection may be more acceptable, complete, and meaningful; analysis and interpretation of findings may be more accurate; and sustainability and meaningful dissemination of findings may be more likely (Rhodes, Alonzo, et al., 2017; Rhodes, Duck, Alonzo, Downs, & Aronson, 2013; Rhodes