Abstract
Understanding community needs and establishing research priorities must occur through respectful and effective collaborations between communities, local organizations, and researchers. Qualitative inquiry can serve as a bridge between researchers and communities, allowing for group goal identification and priority setting. Qualitative techniques can transform the traditional participant-researcher relationship into a rich partnership steered by empowered representatives of a community. These approaches can also inform program planning through formative process evaluation and ongoing community engagement. Additionally, qualitative methods serve as a foundation for Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) or Action Research. Qualitative data collection methods vary widely but frequently involve interviews, observations, or focus groups. Less common, but more interactive and creative approaches, such as intercept interviews, freelisting, walking interviews, photo elicitation interviews, photovoice, and nominal group technique can enhance a researcher’s ability to collaborate with a community and create lasting and effective partnerships. Each approach presents unique implementation, recruitment, and ethical challenges, all of which will be discussed in this chapter. Since the advent of the internet, communities are no longer necessarily defined by geographically proximate group members, so this chapter will briefly discuss in-person, telephone, and online approaches to community identification, partnership building, and data collection. This chapter will also discuss the researcher’s responsibility to the community in all phases of the research process. We will address data collection, organization, and analysis, including effective ways to work with community members to plan a dissemination strategy. Such strategies may include traditional reports, presentations, exhibits, or websites. Timely reporting of research findings back to the community and the role and value of traditional academic dissemination approaches will also be addressed.
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Frasso, R., Keddem, S., Golinkoff, J.M. (2018). Qualitative Methods: Tools for Understanding and Engaging Communities. In: Cnaan, R., Milofsky, C. (eds) Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations in the 21st Century . Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77416-9_32
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