Youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) is an applied research methodology in which youth work in collaboration with adult stakeholders to conduct research projects. YPAR has been traditionally conducted in person, with virtual forums typically serving as ways to share resources and ideas across independent YPAR teams or collecting data. The COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the closure of most public spaces where youth congregate (including schools) and requirements to socially distance, led to translating YPAR projects into completely virtual formats. This paper aims to provide promises and challenges of conducting virtual YPAR during the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes how a team of university faculty, college students, and youth from two community-based youth organizations navigated a YPAR experience during the 2020-2021 academic year. We provide reflections on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on (a) the research setting, (b) the building of collaborative relationships, (c) YPAR methodology, (d) youth engagement, and (e) conceptualization of community action and engagement. We end with the implications for the future of YPAR for practitioners.

Mitigating HIV burden among Black youth requires true community engagement. This brief report identifies challenges, strategies, and lessons learned from transitioning our three-phased, community-engaged HIV prevention project with Black youth to a remote format during COVID-19. The project involved (1) building a community-academic partnership on youth sexual health, (2) participatory youth workshops, and (3) youth surveys and interviews about HIV prevention. Feedback from community-academic partnership, pile sorting themes, and preliminary qualitative analyses guided this report. Challenges included a disruption to in-person engagement while strategies included relying heavily on pre-existing partnerships to recruit youth for interviews. We learned that pre-existing community engagement was essential for completing phase three remotely. More education is needed to support Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) awareness for HIV prevention and there is a need to address structural barriers to healthcare engagement such as community violence and mental illness. Community-engaged HIV research focused on youth can adapt if anchored in community relationships. Future studies must work to more fully center youth’s voices and address the structural issues that may inhibit them from engaging in HIV prevention.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic altered the research landscape dramatically, but the need to understand impacts on communities through research was as great as ever. In this paper, we detail the adaptive processes we leveraged to bring a network of community and academic partners together virtually and collaboratively build a survey reaching diverse populations, the challenges we faced, and what ultimately facilitated our success. The largest driver of our work was our shared goal of gaining a better understanding of the psychosocial impacts of the pandemic on New Yorkers in order to address their needs more meaningfully. Pre-existing relationships with community partners and flexible working processes grounded in equity also supported the functioning of the team. While participant recruitment proved to be challenging, the team pivoted and employed several strategies to reach our intended audiences and increase participation. This paper includes community stakeholders’ reflections on facilitators and barriers to survey development and recruitment in the context of a pandemic, as well as considerations for moving forward with virtual community-engaged research under challenging circumstances. In addition to sharing the collaborative processes that we built, our research-to-action network’s outputs, and our reflections on successes and roadblocks we faced, this paper highlights lessons in the importance of flexibility, trust, and innovation when conducting collaborative research during rapidly evolving public health crises.

Citizen science projects in health-related research usually follow a crowdsourcing approach where laypersons primarily have a supplying role in data collection. By contrast, this article presents an approach on a much higher engagement level (co-creation) where a team of professional and citizen scientists jointly plans, implements, and evaluates a scientific study on a chronic disease from which the citizen (patient) scientists themselves suffer. We call this approach patient science; it systematically makes use of the patients’ expertise of living with the disease. This article describes the pilot project and conceptual differences compared to other participatory approaches in medical and health research. It elaborates on the implications of involving chronically ill people as co-researchers and, finally, reflects on the benefits and challenges of patient science.

Participatory research engages community stakeholders in the research process, from problem identification and developing the research question, to dissemination of results. There is increasing recognition in the field of health research that community-engaged methods can be used throughout the research process. The volume of guidance for engaging communities and conducting participatory research has grown steadily in the past 40+ years, in many countries and contexts. Further, some institutions now require stakeholder engagement in research as a condition of funding. Interest in collaborating in the research process is also growing among patients and the public. This article provides an overview for selecting participatory research methods based on project and partnerships goals.

Green space is beneficial for health, and the co-design of green spaces is vital to allow community input into their development and encourage their use. However, to date there is limited evidence about the most effective ways to ensure the co-design, maintenance and ownership of green spaces by communities over time. Participatory methods such as transect walks with photovoice offer an opportunity to explore these issues. This study describes an original participatory project in a deprived, multi-ethnic part of Bradford, UK, which aims to use innovative participatory methods to explore how the maintenance, co-design and ownership of green spaces affect their use for health benefits. Participatory methods will be used to explore local community perceptions of and satisfaction with their local green spaces. Three phases of data collection will be conducted in a longitudinal qualitative study spanning 3 years. Each phase will use transect walks with photovoice and semi-structured interviews (n= 24), and focus groups (participant n=40) in four green space locations in Bradford, UK.

Background Minority adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer survivors experience disparities in receipt of survivorship care. Objective This study describes the infrastructure of a community-partnered participatory research (CPPR) project between a community-based organization and a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer center to develop culturally-tailored interventions to improve Latino AYA cancer survivor knowledge regarding their need for survivorship care. Methods Research team participants included the community organization and NCI cancer center directors, research coordinators, a community liaison, and cross-training program interns. Through use of Jones’ theoretical framework, additional stakeholders from academic and community settings were identified and invited to participate in the research team. A process evaluation and qualitative interviews were conducted to assess equal partnership between community and academic stakeholders and determine if the infrastructure followed the five core principles of CPPR. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze qualitative data. Conclusions CPPR between an NCI-designated cancer center and a community-based organization is a new research model for conducting minority AYA cancer survivor outreach. Open communication was critical in engaging the Latino community to discuss their survivorship needs. Community stakeholders were key to infrastructure success through fostering a cohesive partnership with and acting as the voice of the Latino community. Implementing a cross-training program promoted continued engagement of community members with academic partners. Proper infrastructure development is critical to building successful research partnerships in order to develop culturally-tailored interventions to improve survivorship care knowledge.

Community health improvement processes are diverse and complex, and evaluation methods to gain generalizable knowledge across community settings are limited by available data, and the need for deep contextual knowledge. This article describes an innovative participatory approach to evaluation of a transformation initiative involving up to eighteen communities nationwide. The approach blends two qualitative research synthesis methods: participatory action synthesis and meta-ethnography and applies them to the pragmatic evaluation of a program in real-life settings. In this article, we present the justification for and details about the evaluation process. The approach presented here will be useful to both researchers and practitioners interested in evaluating community-based health and well-being initiatives and other complex interventions conducted in complex settings.

Participatory research methods increase the quality and relevance of a study and are a key element of community practice. However, participatory methods can be difficult to employ at the outset of a research study with vulnerable, hard-to-reach populations. Intimate partner violence survivors are a particularly vulnerable population who are at increased risk of experiencing abuse-related trauma and have distinct safety-related needs. In order to engage survivor populations, researchers can employ survivor-centered, trauma-informed approaches to build trust and develop relationships that facilitate increased engagement in the research process over time. This paper outlines the methods and strategies that academic partners used to establish, increase, and maintain participatory engagement with women who experienced harm by intimate partners. The process began with a community-based, qualitative needs assessment study for survivors whose partners were in a relationship violence intervention program. In addition to responding to specific aims, this study simultaneously helped to create a pool of potential collaborators. Academic partners used member checking to establish trustworthiness of the study findings and introduce the participants to the concepts of participatory engagement. Next, researchers established an advisory group to develop practice recommendations, which ultimately led to academic and community partners co-designing a community-based dissemination project. We discuss successes and tensions inherent in the engagement process, important lessons learned, and provide recommendations for future community practice.

The veracity of qualitative research is typically measured according to well-established principles of trustworthiness. Adhering to these principles demonstrates that findings are the result of a rigorous methodology and that findings accurately describe the experiences of participants. Member checking is one strategy often utilized to ensure the credibility of the findings, while also generating a valuable opportunity for research participants to actively participate in the analytic process. However, there is limited guidance as to how to conduct member checks that are culturally and contextually relevant to all research participants, particularly if data has been collected in multiple languages with diverse participants. In these instances, researchers must remain vigilant to avoid excluding the voices of participants or designing member checks that might not be culturally and contextually responsive. This article describes a technique — utilizing “I-poems” — as an innovative way to conduct the member checking process with a diverse group of survivors of intimate partner violence who participated in a longitudinal evaluation of the services they received. This inclusive and innovative member checking process was found to be a culturally relevant way to maximize participation, minimize power imbalances, and invite research participants to become active partners in the analytic process.

This article documents the use of professional conversation as a method of participatory research to question, inform and innovate assessment practices used in tertiary settings. Utilising a professional conversations model, four tertiary educators engaged in a 6-month long email conversation designed to explore our individual and collective sense-making around use of a specific mode of assessment relating to sport pedagogy-related teacher and coach education courses. Justification for use of a professional conversations model is presented, along with participants’ experiences of engaging in this participatory method of data capture. A brief summary of participants’ post-conversation views on PASS is included, as well as recommendations relating to the utility of using a professional conversations model as a participatory research method.

In this article, we compare two international participatory studies on poverty – one conducted in 1999 and published in 2000 as “Voices of the Poor: Crying out for Change” by the World Bank; the other, conducted from 2016 to 2019 as a partnership between the University of Oxford and the international movement ATD Fourth World, titled The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty. After introducing the subject, we present our theoretical background, distinguishing between participatory poverty assessments (PPA) and transdisciplinary research. We then discuss the methodological tools and processes deployed in the studies, before widening the discussion to broader issues concerning the participation of persons experiencing poverty in poverty research. We explore the extent to which each study empowered participants by involving them at each stage of the research process, whether space was opened up for participants to exercise greater agency through the cultivation of pro-poor alliances; whether power relations were recognized and/or countered, and finally, whether the studies had the potential to achieve transformative results. We conclude that while both studies were participatory in nature, the ATD Fourth World research followed a more demanding methodology, requiring deeper and more intensive participation of persons experiencing poverty at all stages of the research process.

A hallmark of participatory research is its ability to overcome power imbalances and empower its participants through a sharing of power and decision making from design to dissemination. However, that is not to say that such sharing of power and decision making is unproblematic. This brief reports on one such experience of problematic power dynamics set within the legal profession and reflexively considers the positionality of participants on the power balance continuum.

In this brief report, the authors share their process for taking the Future Creating Workshop (FCW), a participatory research method intended to help organizations envision new futures, into an online space. Using both synchronous and asynchronous processes in three linked platforms, graduates of a program dedicated to educational leaders’ professional development engaged in the three central phases of the FCW – critique, utopian and realization. The authors discuss key technological considerations as well as challenges and affordances of facilitating this method online. They also share ways that this online adaptation has already informed ongoing and future research partnerships.

Participatory research (PR) encompasses research designs, methods, and frameworks that use systematic inquiry in direct collaboration with those affected by an issue being studied for the purpose of action or change. PR engages those who are not necessarily trained in research but belong to or represent the interests of the people who are the focus of the research. Researchers utilizing a PR approach often choose research methods and tools that can be conducted in a participatory, democratic manner that values genuine and meaningful participation in the research process. This article serves as an introduction to participatory research methods, including an overview of participatory research, terminology across disciplines, elements that make a research method participatory, and a model detailing the choice points that require decisions about which tools and methods will produce the desired level of participation at each stage of the research process. Intentional choices of participatory research methods, tools, and processes can help researchers to more meaningfully engage stakeholders and communities in research, which in turn has the potential to create relevant, meaningful research findings translated to action.

The SEED Method is a multi-stakeholder approach that was created to involve diverse stakeholders in the development and prioritization of research questions using community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles. Here we describe an adaptation of the SEED Method that focuses on developing and prioritizing strategies for addressing a health problem and bringing stakeholders together to develop and implement community action plans based on those strategies. We describe steps for implementing the SEED Method for community action planning and the results of a case study in a rural Virginia community with high opioid prescription and mortality rates. A participatory research team worked with three groups of Topic stakeholders to gather data, develop conceptual models, and create and prioritize strategies for reducing prescription and non-prescription opioid misuse and overdoses. Each group came up with 19 to 25 strategies and prioritized their top five, which included actions, services or programs, strategies, policies, and system changes. Attendees at community action planning meetings reviewed the 15 prioritized strategies, proposed three additional strategies, and prioritized their top choices. Community stakeholders started four work groups to implement the selected strategies in collaboration with the research team.

The purpose of this article is to describe how researchers and community stakeholders can use Charrette processes to effectively build partnerships and stimulate successful community-based participatory research (CBPR). The term “Charrette” originated in the architectural design field. Kotval et al. (2014) described the Charrette as “a process of collaboration, intense dialogue and deliberation among participants to promote understanding and facilitate planning activity” (p. 494). The use of Charrette in CBPR is still an emerging concept in the literature, however, a few key studies have demonstrated that Charrette is a promising tool for CBPR researchers and stakeholders. Kennedy’s (2017) eight Charrette characteristics serve as an evaluative framework for examining the use of the Charrette in the two CBPR projects described in this paper. These cases illustrate how the CBPR Charrette was tailored to fit the needs of the project stakeholders. Recommendations for utilizing the CBPR Charrette are discussed, and important considerations are highlighted for community and academic groups who engage patients and community stakeholders in the research process.

Estimates in dissemination, implementation, and services (DIS) research continue to present a 17-year lag for implementation of only 14% of evidence-based clinical services and technologies in practice (Chambers, 2018) – especially troubling for communities characterized by disproportionately high rates of poverty, crime and mental health need (Yoshikawa, Aber, & Beardslee, 2012). Academic-community partnerships offer pathways by which to speed the transport of evidence-based innovations; however, a range of challenges can disrupt implementation and adoption (Damschroder et al., 2009). This manuscript presents Compassion-Oriented Reflection and Engagement (CORE), a framework to inform academic collaborators’ perspectives and practices towards building flexible, responsive partnerships with youth-serving community-based organizations.