Using Community-Based Participatory Research to Understand and Eliminate Social Disparities in Health for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations

Abstract

In the United States, public health developed to a large degree as a voluntary movement—or, more accurately, a set of different voluntary movements—each campaigning for some particular health reform. As these movements became professionalized, as the first health departments were created, and as the first schools of public health were developed, scientific education was seen as the necessary basis of rational social and health reform. Over time, and especially after World War II, pressures on schools of public health led to an ever greater emphasis on research than on practice, a tendency fueled by the funding mechanisms of the National Institutes of Health. By the 1980s it had become clear that the schools of public health and their research productivity had become ever more clearly divorced from the activities of public health departments. The movement to community-based participatory research (CBPR) was, then, an attempt to reconnect the research enterprise with the actual needs of public health as defined by the people whose health was to be affected.