The Lawrence Research Initiative is an academic community collaborative project that was established in the fall of 2006 as a working group of the Mayor's Health Task Force, to promote community-participatory and community-responsive research in Lawrence. The Research Initiative Working Group (RIWG) includes representatives from the community, City of Lawrence, area universities, and community organizations.

Many local community organizations have been approached over the years and asked to facilitate research in Lawrence. However, the researchers making these requests have had varying levels of sensitivity to community concerns and varying abilities to form collaborative relationships with community groups. As well, there has not always been feedback of study results to the community, nor concrete benefit as a result of participation.

The Research Initiative aims to build a research infrastructure to assure that research conducted in Lawrence will provide a clear benefit to the community by including community members in all research phases. The key to mutually-beneficial research is called the Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach.

We encourage the use of a CBPR approach in all Lawrence research endeavors through our Guiding Documents. These include core principles for research partnerships, a series of questions to help delineate formal agreements for research, a model to help guide researchers and community members toward an equitable and mutually-beneficial research process and result, and a glossary of research words. These Guiding Documents were adopted by the City of Lawrence Board of Health in February of 2008.

• The Tools for Research Partnerships document contains the following:
  • The Core Principles of a Partnership Approach to Research in Lawrence:
    • Research is helpful to community development
    • Working with community members makes better science
    • Researchers and members of the Lawrence community can and should create good partnerships based on fairness and positive exchanges
  • Questions for Research Partnership Agreements are for Researchers and Community Groups to go through together prior to embarking on a collaborative project to be certain they're in agreement, to fulfill the core principles, and to allow everyone involved to reflect upon their roles, responsibilities and rights.
• The Steps to Building Successful Research Partnerships in Lawrence matrix describes each stage of the research process for what the partners should be considering to support this collaborative approach.
• The Glossary of Research Terms helps to create a common vocabulary and empower Community Organizations to feel they're on better footing with the researchers in participating in the research process.

We strongly encourage anyone engaging in research in Lawrence to use these guiding documents as we believe there is real benefit to Academics from genuine collaboration with community. We also welcome feedback as to how the Guiding Documents worked for them.

For researchers who feel a partnership approach is not warranted there are Questions for Non-Collaborative Community-Responsive Research. We urge you to strongly consider our Guiding Documents.

• Creating Community-Based Participatory Research in a Diverse Community: A Case Study
• http://yale.edu/bioethics/contribute_documents/.../researchinadiverse.pdf

• CBPR principles translated into Spanish:
• http://lawrencemhtf.org/.../Israel et al CBPR Principles Spanish.pdf
• Human Participant Protections Research Training at the following website:
• http://phrp.nihtraining.com/users/login.php
• University of Houston-Downtown
• http://www.uhd.edu/research/phs/documents/Human_Subjects_Presentation.ppt
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: State By State Health Data
• http://www.commissiononhealth.org/StateByStateData.aspx
• Resources for Community-Based Participatory Research
• http://lawrencemhtf.org/files/research/CCPH-CBPR-resources.pdf
• AHRQ: Información en español
• http://www.ahrq.gov/consumer/espanoix.htm

July 23rd 10AM - Noon at the Lawrence Senior Center

© 2010 Lawrence MHTF | Last Modified: Sep 02 2010 14:57:05
For technical issues contact the Webmaster.