Community research: who’s in control?

There is research fatigue and a growing mistrust of research practice. Increasingly, people want to be involved with setting the research agenda about their health, to be centred on issues which matter to them.

One of our commitments at Impact on Urban Health is to create more inclusive models for generating insight. We don’t just want our research to capture the lived experience of the communities we support. We want the voices and experiences of people living in our place to be integral to the design and delivery of both research about health and the health interventions we fund.

That’s why we partner with organisations like TSIP who focus on community engagement and place-based working. They collaborate with community researchers; people who are passionate about their community and have a deep understanding of the health challenges in them.

For example, community researchers working were able to speak to many residents in Southwark and Lambeth, including a high proportion of Black people, about their experiences adapting and coping during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As a result, we’ve also partnered with TSIP’s spin-off research hub, Centric. Centric works to empower diverse communities of colour across the urban landscape and upskill its researchers to do more than just research.  

In collaboration with TSIP and Centric, later this year we’ll be publishing a literature review of community-based research practices and their impact on improving health. Ahead of that, Louise Mousseau, Portfolio Director at Impact on Urban Health spoke to Shaun Danquah, Founder of Centric about community research and health inequalities.

Louise:    

Shaun, tell me a little bit about why you started thinking about community research as a model?       

Shaun:    

I first started to think about community research as a model when I was a PhD student. It dawned on me that there was this significant gap between academia and community. As a “so-called ‘academic”’, I was involved in a lot of discussions about community, what it looked like and what it is, but there was no connection with the community. I thought to myself that I needed to do something to close that gap because there’s a lot of theory and discussion without any real people in the room.   

When I left the academic sector, I joined TSIP and started looking at some of the projects it was working on, realising I needed to do something about this. I wanted to build a community research model that engages with real, local people and can get a real-world perspective on the agendas and issues that are being spoken about in theory.   

The community has a lot to say, and they understand the nuance and the locality, but we needed to give them the skills to carry out research. We got in touch with Impact on Urban Health, received and built a training and upskilling package to train up local people in Lambeth and Southwark in quantitative and qualitative analysis. That was stage one – identifying that there was this clear gap between academic institutions and communities and understanding how to bring those two worlds closer together.  

Louise:    

You’ve done a literature review as part of the community researchers’ training, and the community researchers also did interviews with other organisations working on participatory methods to varying degrees. Was there anything that was unexpected about that process?  

Shaun:   

There are a lot of literature reviews written in which there are no community voices. They are always very theory-heavy with no regard to real people, so part of that method was to create documents and publications that contain a real voice.