Let us count the ways: How CBPR leads to more rigorous research

“Communities have problems, universities have departments:” this saying indicts the constraints that academic disciplines impose on understanding our most pressing public health issues. It also ignores that “the people hold thousands of solutions in their hands” as noted by Via Campesina, the international peasant movement. Yet CBPR approaches to research, which are trans- or even post-disciplinary and tap place-based knowledge and wisdom, are often cast as being in antithesis to scientific rigor.

This presentation shares process and results from two CBPR food system projects to illustrate myriad ways that the place-based and larger community-based experience and wisdom of community partners contributes to and is often necessary for not only research ethics and relevance, but also for rigor. The Food Dignity action research collaboration of 5 community and 3 academic organizations aims to identify, enable, document and assess community-driven solutions to building sustainable and just food systems. Three of those 8 partners later also convened with additional partners in Wind River Indian Reservation to design a pilot project for a randomized controlled trial on the health impacts of home gardens. This presentation illustrates the many different ways our efforts to build equitable research collaborations have also led to more rigor in our research design and outcomes, in methods ranging from narrative inquiry in case studies to surveys in randomized controlled trials. Our work shows how CPBR is more “right” in both senses of the word.