The developmental stages of a community-university partnership: the experience of Padres Informados/Jovenes Preparados.

BACKGROUND

Strong and sustained community-university partnerships are necessary for community-based participatory translational research. Little attention has been paid to understanding the trajectory of research partnerships from a developmental perspective.

OBJECTIVE

To propose a framework describing partnership development and maturation based on Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development and describe how our collaboration is moving through those stages.

METHODS

Collaborators engaged in three rounds of iterative reflection regarding characteristics and contributors to the maturation of the Padres Informados/Jovenes Preparados (Informed Parents/Prepared Youth [PI/JP]) partnership.

LESSONS LEARNED

Each stage is characterized by broad developmental partnership tasks. Conflict or tension within the partnership is often a part of achieving the associated tasks. The strengths developed at each stage prepare the partnership for challenges associated with subsequent stages.

CONCLUSIONS

This framework could provide a means for partnerships to reflect on their strengths and challenges at a given time point, and to help understand why some partnerships fail whereas others achieve maturity.