Eugenia Eng, DrPH, Health Behavior and Health Education, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Rosenau Hall - Campus Box 7440, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7400, (919) 966-3909, eugenia_eng@unc.edu, Scott D. Rhodes, PhD, MPH, CHES, Department of Public Health Sciences, Wake Forest University Health Sciences, Section on Social Sciences and Health Policy, Medical Center Boulevard, Winston-Salem, NC 27157-1063, Derek M. Griffith, PhD, Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, University of North Carolina School of Public Health, 319-C Rosenau Hall, CB #7440, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7440, Alice Ammerman, DrPH, RD, Department of Nutrition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1700 Airport Road, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, Meera Viswanathan, PhD, Health, Social and Economics Research, RTI International, 3040 Cornwallis Rd., Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, and Lucille Webb, MEd, Strengthening the Black Family, Inc., Box 28716, 568 East Lenoir Street, Raleigh, NC 27611.

Although many health researchers and practitioners offer definitions of community and participatory approaches to research, no clear consensus has emerged on what defines community-based participatory research (CBPR). This review of published, peer-reviewed literature sought to identify essential elements , “best practices”, including characteristics of successful investigator-community partnerships, and major expected outcomes, from both the research and community perspectives. Through standard electronic database searches, we identified and retrieved 55 peer-reviewed articles, that were mainly definitional, reviews or syntheses of the field, or “how to” discussions. These articles used CBPR or similar terms, such as action research, collaborative community action research, community-centered praxis, participatory action research, participatory evaluation, and participatory research. Three reviewers abstracted content from these articles by completing a matrix to summarize the nature, principles, and practical aspects of CBPR. These abstractions were compared and contrasted in terms of seven main steps and stages of CBPR, A senior reviewer reread the articles to verify the text inserted in each cell of the completed matrix, and then summarized the results as themes.

From this analysis, we arrived at the following workable definition of CBPR: CBPR is a collaborative research approach that is designed to ensure and organize participation by communities affected by the issue being studied, representatives of organizations, and researchers in all aspects of the research process and action. This definition guided our further work and, we believe, can serve the purposes of funding agencies that extensively support CBPR, as well as other interested parties and agencies.

Learning Objectives: