Creating community-based participatory research in a diverse community: a case study

Communities struggle to create research guidelines for ethical collaborative research within their locale. In Lawrence, Massachusetts (USA) a collaborative group of community members and academic researchers, known as the Mayor's Health Task Force Research Initiative Working Group, took on the challenge of creating guidelines for ethical community-based research. This case study of the Task Force's work addresses questions of research ethics in a diverse community where families struggle with few resources and face many health disparities, under the often-intrusive and unhelpful scrutiny of researchers from the many nearby major research universities. Representatives from the city, community organizations, and research universities developed a set of core ethical principles for research partnerships, a list of criteria for agreements between partners, and a model to help guide researchers and community members toward equitable and mutually beneficial research. This model can be generalized to similar other communities.