What Is Community-Based Participatory Research?

What Makes Research Community-Based and Participatory?

A researcher enters a neighborhood, recruits local residents, collects interviews, and leaves to analyze the data at the university. The study is certainly taking place in a community. But is it community-based participatory research?

Not necessarily.

The word participatory changes the meaning substantially. Community-based participatory research, usually abbreviated as CBPR, is not simply conventional research relocated from a laboratory or university into a community. Community partners are meant to participate in the research process itself, bringing their knowledge, priorities, resources, and perspectives into decisions that would otherwise belong primarily to researchers.

This distinction matters because CBPR is sometimes used as a broad label for almost any project involving communities. Genuine CBPR makes stronger claims about partnership, power, co-learning, and the relationship between research and action.

CBPR Treats Community Members as Research Partners

How Community-Based Participatory Research Works

CBPR is an approach, not a particular research method

Researchers sometimes encounter CBPR alongside terms such as qualitative research, focus groups, or action research and assume that it prescribes a particular method. It does not.

CBPR describes an approach to the research relationship. The distinguishing feature is the collaborative partnership through which research is developed and conducted. Within that partnership, researchers may use qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods according to the research question.

A CBPR project could therefore include surveys, interviews, observations, administrative data, biological measurements, or even randomized trials. Published work documented by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown CBPR being used alongside randomized controlled trial designs. The presence of a rigorous experimental design and substantial community participation are not inherently contradictory.

Research in a community is not automatically CBPR

This is perhaps the most useful distinction to make at the outset.

The National Academies has explicitly noted this distinction, describing CBPR as different from research merely placed in a community without active community involvement.

A researcher who conducts interviews in a neighborhood and then makes every substantive research decision independently may be conducting community-based research. Adding the word participatory requires something more consequential than geographic location or community recruitment.

Community is not necessarily a geographic place

The word community can also cause confusion. In CBPR literature, community has often been conceptualized as a unit of identity rather than merely a location.

A community may be organized around a neighborhood, but it can also emerge from shared identity, experience, culture, interests, social relationships, or circumstances. A geographic area may contain several communities rather than one coherent community with a single set of priorities.

This matters because researchers cannot simply enter a location and assume that whoever is easiest to contact speaks for “the community.” Determining who actually has a relevant stake in the research requires attention to internal diversity, representation, and power.

Equitable partnership is a central aspiration

Foundational CBPR frameworks emphasize collaborative and equitable partnership across the research process. This does not necessarily mean every partner performs identical tasks or has identical expertise. It means community knowledge is not treated as secondary by default and that decision-making is structured so community partners can exert meaningful influence.

Researchers may contribute expertise in study design, measurement, analysis, or scholarly literature. Community partners may contribute experiential knowledge, cultural understanding, local relationships, practical expertise, knowledge of historical context, or insight into whether proposed procedures will work in practice.

These contributions can be different without being arranged in a simple hierarchy.

The difficult question is how influence should be distributed when responsibilities and expertise differ. That is why researchers should define how much influence research partners have over particular decisions rather than assuming that the word “partnership” settles the issue.

CBPR builds on community strengths, not only community problems

Research involving disadvantaged communities can easily become deficit-oriented. A community may be described through disease rates, educational difficulties, poverty, risk behaviors, or unmet needs while its organizations, relationships, knowledge, leadership, and existing solutions receive much less attention.

Foundational CBPR principles instead emphasize building on strengths and resources already present within communities.

This does not require researchers to minimize genuine problems. Rather, the research asks not only “What is wrong here?” but also “What knowledge, relationships, capabilities, and resources already exist that could contribute to understanding or addressing the problem?”

Co-learning works in more than one direction

CBPR also challenges the assumption that academic researchers enter communities primarily to transfer expertise. The partnership is intended to support learning among all partners.

Researchers may learn how local history affects trust, why an intervention conflicts with everyday realities, or which outcomes matter to residents. Community partners may develop research skills, gain access to scientific evidence, or learn methods useful for local decision-making and advocacy.

Co-learning does not mean everyone must become equally proficient in every aspect of research. A community partner does not need to become a statistician before their experiential knowledge becomes legitimate, just as statistical training does not make an academic researcher an expert in someone else's lived experience.

CBPR connects knowledge generation with action

Another recurring principle in CBPR is the integration of knowledge and action for mutual benefit. The aim is generally not simply to produce information about a community and end the relationship when the paper is published.

Depending on the project, action might involve adapting an intervention, improving a service, developing community resources, changing organizational practice, informing policy, strengthening local capacity, or creating evidence that community organizations can use.

This orientation does not mean researchers are entitled to promise social change that a single study cannot deliver. Nor does it justify manipulating findings to support a preferred community outcome. The empirical results still need to be reported accurately, including findings that partners find disappointing or inconvenient.

The challenge is to make research relevant without allowing desired outcomes to predetermine the evidence. That distinction becomes particularly important when considering how stakeholder involvement can improve relevance without controlling the findings.

Participation can extend across the research process

Community partners may contribute to identifying the problem, setting priorities, developing research questions, choosing or adapting methods, recruiting participants, collecting data, interpreting findings, disseminating results, and planning action.

Foundational descriptions of CBPR emphasize collaborative participation across phases of research, but this should not be reduced to a mechanical requirement that every community partner must perform every task. Roles can differ according to expertise, interest, resources, and the particular partnership.

What matters is whether participation is sufficiently substantive to justify describing the research approach as participatory.

In some projects, community partners may have considerable influence over which research questions are worth asking. In others, their most substantial contributions may concern study design, recruitment, interpretation, or action.

CBPR requires attention to power

Calling academics and community members “partners” does not make differences in power disappear.

Universities may control grant funds, employment, ethics applications, data infrastructure, publication systems, and professional rewards. Academic researchers may be paid to attend meetings that community partners attend in their own time. Researchers may also possess greater familiarity with the language and conventions through which study decisions are formally justified.

CBPR therefore requires deliberate attention to how these asymmetries affect participation. Who controls the budget? Who sets the meeting agenda? Who can veto a decision? Who owns or controls access to data? Who receives credit? Who decides what happens when partners disagree?

Equity is not produced merely by putting different people around the same table.

Long-term relationships often matter

Foundational CBPR principles also emphasize an iterative process and long-term commitment. Trust, especially in communities with histories of extractive or harmful research, may not develop on the timetable of a short grant.

This creates a genuine structural challenge. Research projects have funding periods, staff contracts, deadlines, and publication expectations. Communities continue after the project ends.

Researchers using CBPR should therefore think about what will happen to relationships, interventions, data, community capacity, and commitments after formal funding ends. Sustainability does not always mean keeping the original project running indefinitely, but an abrupt disappearance after data collection sits uneasily with claims of enduring partnership.

What CBPR Could Look Like in Practice

What makes this CBPR is not simply that residents were consulted or that data were collected locally. The research problem, process, interpretation, and use of knowledge are shaped through an ongoing partnership.

The precise division of responsibilities could differ in another CBPR project. Participatory research is not a recipe with identical steps for every community.

Common Misunderstandings About CBPR

Use CBPR Only When You Are Prepared for Genuine Partnership

CBPR is most appropriate when community knowledge is important to understanding the problem and when collaboration can meaningfully influence the research. It is particularly relevant when research concerns locally situated problems, implementation, disparities, services, or issues where trust and community knowledge materially affect what can be learned and acted upon.

CBPR also requires resources. Meetings, relationship building, community coordination, accessible communication, training, reimbursement, compensation, and collaborative interpretation all require time and often money. A grant that funds data collection but not partnership work can make equitable participation difficult before the first community meeting even occurs.

If CBPR is appropriate, think of partnership design as part of research design. The quality of the relationship can affect what questions are asked, whose knowledge is recognized, what data can realistically be collected, how findings are interpreted, and whether the resulting knowledge can be used.

Before Describing a Study as CBPR

Frequently Asked Questions About CBPR

CBPR Means Conducting Research With Communities, Not Merely in Them

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