Trust development in community academic partnerships

This presentation will present the theory, practice, and methods for understanding trust development as a product of ethical communication within community academic research partnerships. Mistrust in research, which impacts Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR), stems from historic events and institutional histories of collaboration or mis-collaboration. Mistrust can be reinforced by researcher behavior and communication style. Therefore nurturing the trust environment by attending to discursive space is essential especially for partnerships that involve communities of color. CBPR has been deemed an ethical and trust building approach to health research. However, this claim has not been empirically investigated. Findings from a national mixed methods study of over 200 partnerships, the Research for Improved Health (RIH) project, will be presented. Findings highlight the importance of participation, community voice, and commitment in established partnerships and provide gold standards for developing partnerships. The RIH study is a collaborative endeavor between the National Congress of American Indians, University of New Mexico, and the University of Washington, funded by the Native American Research Centers for Health. As part of this study, we are exploring how to develop and operationalize meanings of trust for community academic partnerships, including trust antecedents, and other communication and contextual issues related to trust development and decline. This project advances the understanding of trust in CBPR, including measures and metrics, and takes trust development from theory to application. Further this project contributes to developing a research agenda concerning trust and CBPR with international and global health partnerships.