Measuring Community-Based Participatory Research Partnerships: The Initial Development of an Assessment Instrument

Although the partnership between academic researchers and community members is paramount to community-based research efforts, a limited number of measures exist to evaluate this construct. Of those in existence, no assessment measures include a comprehensive coverage of the many dimensions of partnerships. In addition, these measures were not designed through an extensive community-based participatory research (CBPR) model, in which the strengths of traditional assessment techniques were integrated with input from stakeholders.

The purpose of this article was to describe the creation of a measure to evaluate key dimensions of partnerships forged between researchers and community members using a CBPR approach to measurement development.

The iterative process of developing this measure consisted of integrating valuable feedback from community partners and researchers, via multiple rounds of item sorting and qualitative interviewing.

The resultant measure, titled Partnership Assessment In community-based Research (PAIR), consists of 32 items, and comprises 5 dimensions: communication, collaboration, partnership values, benefits, and evaluation. The innovative process of using CBPR in the development of measures, the benefits of this approach, and the lessons learned are highlighted.

PAIR was developed out of a need identified jointly by community members and researchers, and is intended to characterize the range of relationships between researchers and community members engaging in community-based research and programming.