My first experience with field research occurred in 1996 just after earning my doctorate. I worked for a small, progressive, woman-owned business in the San Francisco Bay Area that provided research and evaluation services to local, state, and federal agencies. My specialty was welfare policy evaluation, and there were plenty of opportunities to evaluate new programs set in motion by the welfare reforms of 1996.
I was in my mid-20s and nervous walking into the unfamiliar space of welfare offices. It surprised me to see that, as uneasy as I was, the people who were to be my respondents were even more so. I thought I was entirely innocuous—just a recent grad, overdressed and attempting to seem professional, asking what I thought were straightforward questions about a new program. To folks on the ground, I was not innocuous. Frontline aid workers and their supervisors eyed me with suspicion and were visibly uncomfortable during interviews.
My interactions with single mothers receiving aid were just as bad. Even I could see that the focus group protocol we used was off base from what women wanted to discuss. In one of these focus groups, I remember veering far from my script and spending most of the time explaining to the group that food stamps were still available even when they reached their maximum months of aid. I don’t believe these were entirely failed research projects—the discomfort and confusion I witnessed were certainly part of the story of early implementation. But they were not entirely successful either.
At that time, I held close to my training and didn’t question our approach, but I knew something felt wrong. I engaged in so-called “unbiased” and “objective” research, which I was taught added to its rigor. By these logics, soliciting the input of stakeholders during the research design process would doom the project to subjectivity and bias. However, having included community stakeholders in our design process would have generated a different research approach and perhaps more useful research findings.
Today, my views on objectivity, rigor, and whose knowledge counts in the research enterprise have taken a sea change. Instead of holding community stakeholders at bay, I aim to work alongside them throughout the research process to enhance the validity, rigor, and actionability of my work. I no longer conduct evaluations; instead, I work with partners to design research projects that answer critical questions they need answered and learn with and from folks who are close to the ground during the entire research process. Some scholars have criticized this approach as veering more toward advocacy than rigorous scientific research. In this piece, I aim to dispel that myth by arguing—as Warren, Calderón, Kupscznk, Squires and Su (2018) describe—that rather than sequester community-engaged research to the sidelines of academia, sociology should elevate it as a rigorous, theoretically rich, and ethical way to conduct research and advance social justice.
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What Is Community-Engaged Research?
The Carnegie definition pertains to all forms of community engagement—research, teaching, and learning—but some of the words particularly resonate with my values in community-engaged research. Attention to reciprocity, exchange of knowledge, and sharing resources is central to my practice of community-engaged research focused on children, youth, and young adults in community contexts. Creating projects that are mutually beneficial requires respecting the knowledge that comes both from lived experience and from academic training. Community engagement enriches scholarship through the greater validity of constructs by tapping into the knowledge with those whose lived experiences.
Yet the Carnegie definition falls short in some other areas. Community-engaged research is focused on critical social justice issues and attends to ethical and epistemic dilemmas in ways that elevate equity in the knowledge production process. It is the antithesis of extractive research, a positivist approach to truth-finding through the academic lens that extracts the life experiences from vulnerable communities and repurposes them for the academic gaze without vetting these findings in the community, or even sharing them back with the “human subjects” who acted as respondents.
The Ethics of Community-Engaged Research
The ethical component to this work is essential, and institutional review boards (IRBs) do not even begin to address it. In some cases, according to Lac and Fine (2018), they can even suppress the research endeavor through regulations that ignore the community engagement process. Although the CITI program, which offers human subjects training to researchers worldwide, now has an optional community-engaged research module, there are no guidelines in the Common Rule (which governs how IRBs operate) about ethical collaborations with community organizations or members. I have seen some examples of ethical guidelines for specific research centers, including this one for the Agroecology Research-Action Collective. Yet more often than not, there are no principles underpinning our work. In the absence of formalized guidance, those of us who work collaboratively in the community are left to devise our own ethical compass and hold ourselves accountable to it.
Research has documented some common understandings of ethical practices in community-engaged research, including: a focus on relationship and trust building; long-term collaboration; strong communication; and providing research findings back to the community in fora and formats that most resonate with partners. I consider these the baseline criteria for ethical practice. Thornier ethical issues include: who owns the data that are collected through research; who has the right to publish results; and how to present findings when there are differences across stakeholder groups regarding what they imply.
More complex is how to counter the “epistemic injustice” that results from traditional scientific research. As described by Glass and Newman (2015), this is the notion that traditional modes of research privilege university-centered over community-centered ways of knowing, and in so doing, demean and exclude those with lived knowledge from the scientific knowledge production process. I recently coauthored an article with Glass, Sabati, Chang and Nojan that queries community partners about their experiences with research partnerships. We learned that partners do not consider community-based research an inherent social good. As community-engaged researchers, we must orient ourselves toward equity and justice throughout the research process.
All of these ethical issues are difficult to navigate, but I think the most important that must be addressed is how to eschew what scholar Eve Tuck (2008) calls damage centered research. Tuck’s assertion is that traditional scientific scholarship calls attention to inequalities by highlighting the damages faced by marginalized communities—higher crime rates, lower test scores, worse health outcomes. By focusing on what is wrong with/in communities, even in a structural way that acknowledges the forces of power and oppression, researchers have the capacity to erase the strengths and joys that are present. This attention to strengths is a critical reframing that many community-engaged researchers employ in trying to support their partners to use research in aspirational ways. Navigating this terrain ethically requires keen attention to multiple ways of knowing, and a critical consideration of the metrics we commonly take for truth.
Valuing this Work
Community engagement in research has gained attention and support across disciplines, with major funders such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and William T. Grant Foundation now encouraging partnering for research through special grants programs. There is a national network of community-engaged researchers in education, sociology, and urban planning called URBAN—the Urban Research Action Network—that has nodes in eight localities and regular conferences devoted to sharing resources and findings, as well as elevating community-engaged research throughout academia. The ASA has shown its support for this type of research through the Community Action Research Initiative grants (CARI) and the Sociology Action Network.
To fully acknowledge and value this work, we must consider how to support university researchers engaging with community partners for research, particularly in the academic review process. The trifecta of research, teaching, and service in community-engaged research and teaching would seem a bonanza as it hits all three areas traditionally considered in the review process. Yet, because it is time-consuming, some have argued that community-engaged research is the privilege of those who are tenured or those who work outside the confines of the tenure track. Academic institutions recognize the peer-reviewed publications that result from the work, but not the efforts to build relationships, coconstruct projects and findings, and share those findings with nonacademic audiences. The concept of peer review is itself problematic in this context, given that community partners’ “review” is crucial, but ignored in the publishing and personnel review processes.
These criticisms have been laid by many before me and there are currently several movements to rectify them. The Research University Civic Engagement Network, part of Campus Compact, has convened a working group of experts to establish new criteria that universities can use to evaluate community-engaged research. A separate working group in the University of California system is similarly focused and there are many universities that have already made changes to improve the review process. These efforts are one of the best ways to support faculty and graduate students who are BIPOC and/or women—scholars who are more likely than their peers to embed community engagement into their scholarship. Supporting improved processes for review and promotion of community-engaged research is a key action that colleges and universities can take to enhance their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Next Up: Campus + Community
I am launching a center at UC Santa Cruz called Campus + Community with funding from the William T. Grant Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the tremendous support of the Institute for Social Transformation in the Division of Social Sciences. Our aim is to infuse the lessons learned from the literature on community-engaged research to establish ethical approaches to community-engaged research that can be deployed in every discipline and division at the university. We intend to:
- Provide a support infrastructure for engaging community organizations who already partner with UCSC and those looking to partner.
- Link the scholarship and centers on campus that engage with community partners to reduce duplication and increase synergy.
- Offer capacity-building for faculty, staff, students, and community partners to support strong partnerships that generate actionable results.
- Support the research process by offering graduate and undergraduate students opportunities to get involved.
- Support the research dissemination process by centralizing publication production, event planning, and press releases.
- Establish common metrics across units that can more fully assess the scale, scope, and impact of the university’s community-engaged scholarship.
We hope that our attention to the ethics of collaborating specifically for research, and our social justice mission, will create momentum across the community engagement centers in many college campuses to make real and lasting change in both campus and community.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
