Examining Benefits of Academic-Community Research Team Training: Rochester's Suicide Prevention Training Institutes

Although community-engaged research (CER), including community-based participatory research (CBPR), is a growing approach in addressing health disparities, little scientific study on how to enhance its processes or products exists. These fields are built on practice-based case studies, evaluations, and qualitative examinations of principles in action. This gap is as an emerging priority in the clinical and translation sciences.

We designed a 5-day workshop for academic-community research teams in suicide prevention and health promotion, broadly defined. Seasoned academic and community partners developed and implemented curriculum at three training institutes from 2007 to 2010. We developed self-report tools to evaluate this training model for CER practice. We crafted and evaluated both mediating processes and outcome measures for academic and community partners to assess team CER development.

We analyzed post-training evaluation surveys completed late in 2010. We conducted exploratory factor analysis on survey data from 48 community or academic partners. These team members participated in at least one National Institutes of Health-funded CER training institute to advance suicide prevention, broadly defined.

Partnership development measures that capture both academic and community perspectives demonstrate reliability and validity. Multidimensional latent constructs for inclusion in CER development models included partnership agency, personal knowledge and capacities, and benefits of collaborative research partnerships over time. We discuss the utility of findings to future CER training design and study.