This issue of Family & Community Health (33.3) focuses on community-based participatory research (CBPR). In many ways, this form of research is a true public health approach. What I mean by this is that the community, or a subset of the community, is invited to be part of identifying the target area for attention and intervention as well as be part of the team that plans, implements, and evaluates the project or program. As some of the articles mention, many communities are skeptical about researchers who come into the community to gather information for their own goals and purposes and then leave without providing a service to the people who helped them gather the needed research data. An age-old tenet of good public health practices is that of partnering with the recipients of assistance to learn what they want to be assisted with. This is in contrast to an approach whereby the planners determine what the need for the community is and then go about developing programs or other forms of projects to meet that need without getting the input and affirmation of those who will be served.
By engaging in CBPR, researchers and program planners work with those who will ultimately benefit to learn about the conditions and needs that people are experiencing and for which they would desire assistance. This form of action research seeks to both understand and then take action to ameliorate difficult situations. A key feature of Participatory Action Research (PAR) is that "researchers work collaboratively with the 'researched' in an effort to achieve social justice in the form of improved conditions."1(p122) Those who will be affected by the research are proactively included as partners from the earliest planning stages. As will be demonstrated in the articles in this issue, the key principles of PAR are participation/collaboration, empowerment, knowledge, and social change.1 CBPR includes these key principles of PAR and also recognizes and builds upon the unique strengths that each partner brings to the process.
One of the many interesting features of this issue is the diversity of communities and populations featured. Three of the articles deal with Native American people. However, the tribes that are part of the research come from different regions of the United States. They are the Crow people of Montana and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and a third article describes the use of creative expression in the form of photovoice with Native American populations. Likewise, the concerns for Native American groups include water quality, health promotion, and addressing the high rate of cardiovascular disease. Other articles describe strategies to build community capacity with people living in the Lower Mississippi Delta, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and in a Mexican-American community in South Texas. The tool of photovoice is paired with concept mapping to examine what immigrant residents in an urban city in Canada think about their neighborhood. The appeal of these articles is that they are authored by the community teams and coalitions that designed and implemented them. I hope that you will find the articles as interesting and useful and I found them.
Jeanette Lancaster, PhD, RN, FAAN
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