Community-based collaborations: Designing, conducting and sustaining prevention programs

Public health issues have stimulated collaborative prevention and treatment research among researchers, service providers, community members, and consumers. Community-based collaborations can enhance the relevance of research questions and maximize the usefulness of research findings. In addition, collaborative partnerships can help you develop study procedures which are acceptable to potential participants and are sufficiently flexible to navigate common obstacles to conducting research in community settings. Further, community collaborative research efforts can expand community-level resources to serve as a foundation for sustaining evidence-supported intervention and prevention programs after research or demonstration funding has ended (Israel et al. 1998; Institute of Medicine 1998; Schensul 1999; Hoagwood et al., 2010; Wandersman 2003). Perhaps most importantly, collaborative research efforts can shorten the time for translating scientific findings into service options within real world communities (Bell et al. 2008). Thus, collaborative research partnerships have direct benefits to both you as the investigator and community members, by ensuring that a proposed study will focus on public health issues of highest relevance to key stakeholders and yield information that can be applied to the real world.