Community Perspectives
The Ohio State University Prevention Research Center (OSU PRC) Community Partnerships Committee has developed a video to convey issues that community members would like researchers to consider when doing research in and with communities.
This video is the result of a joint academic and community effort. The project began in April 2010 when residents and representatives from community organizations shared common issues and concerns related to community-based research. From their list of issues and concerns, a set of questions was developed used for interviewing a selected group of residents and organization representatives.
An initial version of a video presentation was shared with the OSU PRC community committee. While they liked the messages that were conveyed in the first version, they expressed concern that a greater variety of voices was needed.
In response to this feedback, we interviewed additional community residents, including WIC clients, who do not work at or represent any particular organization. We added portions of those interviews to the video and showed it to the community committee again. We also provided a list of additional comments we heard in the new interviews. Participants at our February 2011 community committee meeting suggested moving more of the residents’ voices to the very beginning of the video, alternating between organization representatives and residents, and focusing on key themes. The result is a video with a clear message about “what researchers should know about doing research with the community."
PRC staff members had an opportunity to share the video at the recent national PRC meeting held by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. The response received was overwhelmingly positive! The video has also been used in some OSU courses related to research methods. Our hope is that this video will be used widely to generate discussions at Ohio State University and other universities to help improve communication and processes within community-based participatory research projects.
For more information, contact Carol Smathers, PRC Program Manager, at 614-292-8181.
