Meera Viswanathan, PhD¹, Alice Ammerman, DrPH, RD², Gerald Gartlehner, MD, MPH³, Eugenia Eng, DrPH⁴, and Kathleen N. Lohr, PhD¹. (1) Health, Social and Economics Research, RTI International, 3040 Cornwallis Rd., Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, 919-316-3930, viswanathan@rti.org, (2) Department of Nutrition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1700 Airport Road, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, (3) Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 725 Airport Road, CB# 7590, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, (4) Health Behavior and Health Education, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Rosenau Hall - Campus Box 7440, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7400

Objectives: AHRQ commissioned the RTI-UNC Evidence-Based Practice Center to conduct a systematic evidence review on community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches to improved health. This paper focuses on two questions covered by the systematic review:

1) How has CBPR been implemented to date with regard to the quality of research methodology and community involvement? 2) What is the evidence that CBPR efforts have resulted in the intended outcomes?

Design: We searched MEDLINE®, Cochrane Collaboration resources, Psycinfo, and Sociofile for peer-reviewed reports on CBPR studies that: were published in English language; conducted in the United States and Canada; and included at least one community collaborator. We also conducted hand-searches of the reference lists of relevant articles and sought additional citations from a panel of experts. From the resulting 123 articles constituting 60 studies, we assessed each study’s research methods and level of community involvement.

Measurements and Main Results: Of the 60 included studies, 30 were noninterventional. Of the remaining interventional studies, 12 studies fully evaluated the intervention and 18 had either not completed the intervention, or not evaluated it fully. 9 of the 12 studies with fully evaluated interventions used experimental or quasi-experimental designs. Communities were most often involved in recruiting and retaining study participants and data collection.

Conclusions: Although we were unable to determine whether the modest positive outcomes reported in fully evaluated interventions could be attributed to CBPR methods, we found little evidence that increased community involvement is associated with low research quality.

Learning Objectives: