The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, USA.
Health Educ Behav. 2013 Jun;40(3):346-54. doi: 10.1177/1090198112459050. Epub 2012 Oct 4.
Active participation of community partners in research aspects of community-academic partnered projects is often assumed to have a positive impact on the outcomes of such projects. The value of community engagement in research, however, cannot be empirically determined without good measures of the level of community participation in research activities. Based on our recent evaluation of community-academic partnered projects centered around behavioral health issues, this article uses semistructured interview and survey data to outline two complementary approaches to measuring the level of community participation in research-a "three-model" approach that differentiates between the levels of community participation and a Community Engagement in Research Index (CERI) that offers a multidimensional view of community engagement in the research process. The primary goal of this article is to present and compare these approaches, discuss their strengths and limitations, summarize the lessons learned, and offer directions for future research. We find that whereas the three-model approach is a simple measure of the perception of community participation in research activities, CERI allows for a more nuanced understanding by capturing multiple aspects of such participation. Although additional research is needed to validate these measures, our study makes a significant contribution by illustrating the complexity of measuring community participation in research and the lack of reliability in simple scores offered by the three-model approach.
社区合作伙伴积极参与社区-学术合作项目的研究方面，通常被认为对这类项目的成果具有积极影响。然而，如果没有衡量社区参与研究活动水平的良好措施，就无法从经验上确定社区参与研究的价值。基于我们最近对围绕行为健康问题的社区-学术合作项目的评估，本文使用半结构化访谈和调查数据，概述了衡量社区参与研究水平的两种互补方法——一种“三模型”方法，用于区分社区参与的水平，以及社区参与研究指数（CERI），提供了研究过程中社区参与的多维视角。本文的主要目标是介绍和比较这些方法，讨论它们的优势和局限性，总结经验教训，并为未来的研究提供方向。我们发现，虽然三模型方法是衡量社区参与研究活动的感知的简单措施，但 CERI 通过捕捉参与的多个方面，允许更细致的理解。尽管需要进一步的研究来验证这些措施，但我们的研究通过说明衡量社区参与研究的复杂性以及三模型方法提供的简单分数缺乏可靠性，做出了重要贡献。
