Translational community-based participatory research for youth substance use prevention in a rural community: Methodological issues

Background: Youth substance use is a global public health concern and occurs frequently in rural environments. Consideration of local context, community characteristics, and local community knowledge is an important strategy in designing youth substance use prevention programs that are sustainable and maximize community engagement and outcomes. Methods: For three years, youth, parents, community leaders, and researchers from different disciplines have been involved in a rural, tobacco-growing community, working on a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project. The community participatory research project had multiple phases, including building initial partnerships, conducting community assessment, developing plans for intervention and evaluation, and final dissemination of the process and results. Results: Community-based participatory research is effective in dealing with challenging community health issues such as youth substance use, which involves complex factors from individual to community levels. Multiple voices, including youth, parents and leaders from the community revealed individual differences as well as community characteristics influencing youth substance use and abuse. CBPR can create connections between experts and local community members, as well as reduce the gaps between research, policy, and practice, which will maximize the community sustainability and impact by generating the best practices. Conclusion: Use of CBPR requires startegies to assure methodological rigor while making efforts to hear the community's voice as much as possible. Several possible approaches, such as triangulation with different methods, including modified Photovoice, interviews, focus groups, Geographical Information Systems, in-depth analysis across the researchers and community members, and member checking of the findings with the community members will be discussed.