Week 5: Class Reading Blog - Christina

“Ethical Challenges for the ‘Outside’ Researcher in Community-Based Participatory Research” (Minkler)

Without trying to be “Captain Obvious” here, as the title suggests, this article discusses Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and its ethical challenges for outside researchers and their community partners. After reading this piece, I felt that it was very relevant to the Community Profile assignment that we have been given.

            To give you a more basic understanding of what CBPR is, it has been defined as not a method per se, but an inclination to research that may include any number of qualitative and quantitative approaches. It begins with a research topic of importance to the community with the aim of combining knowledge and action for social change. A major aim of such research is to benefit the local community by providing new info on a topic of concern, increasing human resources, and including action to help redress the problem (and ideally facilitate social change) as an integral part of the research process.

            Since this class is titled “Community Practice and Social Change,” I felt that the following question was significant to bring up. Who truly represents “the community?” In this article, academic social work professor Mieko Yoshihama and her former doctoral student E. Summerson Carr suggest that “communities are not places that researchers enter, but are instead a set of negotiations that inherently entail multiple and often conflicting interests.” Engaging in CBPR does not mean leaving one’s own scientific standards and knowledge bases at the door, but rather sharing one’s own “unique gifts,” including one’s skills as a research methodologist, while accepting the gifts of others through a genuinely reciprocal learning process. This is basically a give-and-take sort of process.

A question that is also brought to light in this circumstance is whether or not true CBPR can take place when the research question itself comes from an outsider to the community. A key initial step should involve figuring out whether the researcher really is high on the agenda of the affected community. CBPR most frequently involves work with and by low-income communities, which tend to be primarily communities of color. More often than not, the outside researchers involved in the CBPR do not share the race, ethnicity, or culture(s) of their community partners, so opportunities for cultural misunderstandings and for real or perceived racism are often extensive. This is referred to in the article as the “gorilla in the living room.” It’s hard to talk about, but those of us working cross-culturally in CBPR partnerships need to be aware of the potential for all three forms of racism and to have “cultural humility” as we try to navigate this difficult terrain. As they point out, “although none of us can truly become “competent” in another’s culture, we can approach cross- cultural situations with a humble attitude characterized by reflection on our own biases and sources of invisible privilege, an openness to the culture and reality of others, and a willingness to listen and continually learn” (Minker). There are three types of racism that are cause for potential concerns (institutionalized, personally mediated, and internalized racism), and because I am running close to my word limit, this link gives great descriptions and better definitions than the article did. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/154/4/299.full

I wanted to end on an excellent quote I read in this article from Wallerstein: “only through engaging in open dialogue about the inequalities and hidden nature of power, can the relationship become reciprocal and ultimately transformed.” Do you guys agree with this, and do you have any other definitions that you think identify “community?”