This course will provide researchers with qualitative tools and perspectives to authentically conduct community-based participatory research. Participants will learn how to center community perspectives and marginalized voices. Community groups often lack resources and platforms to alleviate narratives about emerging and systemic social and public health challenges. Researchers are often challenged by lacking community partnerships to gather narratives and resources within these communities.

Participants will learn how to:

identify synergies that foster long-term relationships and mutual commitments to social change that can develop research agendas and inform interventions and policy.
authentically capture community perspectives
understand how different stakeholders view a social challenges;
learn how communities organize themselves to address these issues; and
identify how social science researchers can support these efforts through the collection and analysis of various sources of data.

Additionally, participants will learn how to establish trust, gain entry, and maintain relationships and reciprocity, adjust to data collection changes by being malleable and learning from failure, develop strategies to help community members’ narratives and experiences get to decision-making tables, and engage in strategies that reflect community-academic partnerships focused on institutional and community level change.

This course will count as 6.0 CSS short course hours.