Updated by Sarah Du on November 21st,, 2016
The Roles of Students, Faculty Mentors, and Community Partners in CBR Projects
The success of a community-based research (CBR) project depends upon the relationships between each of the individuals or groups involved: the student, the faculty mentor or instructor, and the community partner. This guide is intended to strengthen your awareness of the different perspectives, knowledge, goals, and interests that each individual or group brings to the CBR partnership.
CBR projects are developed and implemented in an applied context. These projects will (1) provide a service to the community partner, (2) serve the academic interests and skills of the student, and (3) offer the student an invaluable learning experience. The success of these projects depends on the involvement of students, faculty, and community partners at every step of the way.
Each individual or group must play a different role in order to carry out a successful CBR project. Consider the following example: in the summer of 2003, a young woman developed a research idea in conjunction with a community organization where she had spent significant time over the last two years in a service capacity. She discussed her ideas with her faculty mentor and revised and focused them to be a manageable research project. Once she became immersed in the organization in this new role, however, it was clear that her project needed to be revised, so with a series of new conversations, she worked out a related, yet slightly different, project that would provide information that was immediately relevant (and much needed) to the organization. This student’s example demonstrates the flexibility that all members of this partnership must have in order for these difficult projects to work, as well as the necessity for effective communication among all parties.
Students might be interested in CBR at Duke because of a class that exposed them to provocative new ideas, or their own experiences with service and/or research that have prompted them to pursue deeper, more substantial involvement. Students can find interested faculty mentors through their own course experiences or by checking the faculty database and reading about faculty research interests on department websites. Students can approach a potential faculty mentor with an idea for a project that comes from her or his service experience, or a student can become involved in an ongoing faculty research project that has aCBR component. CBR projects are complex in that they involve so many interested individuals, so students who are flexible and open-minded about what project to pursue and how to pursue it are likely to be successful. In the scenario above, the student was willing to revise her interests to develop a project that was more immediately relevant to the organization.
The FacultyMentor will participate in every aspect of the CBRproject. Thoughtful faculty involvement is essential for the successful integration of course content, service, and research through guided reflection and feedback for students. For CBR projects, faculty members have extensive experience with how to navigate the university’s research protocol requirementsand can work in conjunction with students and community partners to design and conduct substantive projects of mutual interest. For example, the faculty mentor can provide information on:
- the type of research question to pursue
- methods with which to answer research questions
- current research literature
- data management, analysis, and interpretation
In addition, faculty mentors may find themselves in a debriefing role with their mentees, guiding them through the insights and disappointments that can accompany CBR. In the example above, the student’s faculty mentor played a true mentoring role in his willingness to help the student process and come to terms with the new knowledge she gained through working with this organization and her disillusionment about the challenges she faced. Although she had worked with this group for years, through her role as researcher, she discovered that it used many ineffective processes—something, she learned,was common for organizations of this type. Her faculty mentor was instrumental in helping her move forward with her work with a more educated perspective.
A community partner can be part of Duke University (e.g., a center, like the Women’s Center, or an office, like the Office of Institutional Equity), an organization in the Durham area (e.g., the Durham Public Schools, a non-profit organization) or an organization outside Durham and even outside the United States. The CBR partnership is dependent on the many contributions the community partners make to the collaborative research efforts.
The key to a successful CBR project is that it will not be "dropped into" the community; it will be developed and conducted along with the community. CBRprojects must be designed to meet a community need that is articulated by the community (not assumed by the student or faculty member), may be conducted in a community setting, and should provide information or a product of immediate relevance for the community partner.
Quite often, community-based organizations, particularly non-profits, are overburdened and understaffed, and need help with data analysis, or program evaluation, or a report of recent research findings. It is important for the student and faculty to work with the community partner to identify how research can serve the group’s needs and what form the research should take. The community partner is the expert on the context in which the student will be working and should have input into how the study is enacted, how data are collected, what form the final product will take, etc.